Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (review)

In this critical introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, Jeremy Lane sets out to situate "Bourdieu's work in the two interrelated contexts of the French intellectual field out of which it emerged and the shift to late capitalism which it has analysed" (7). As the non-Bourdieusian expression late capitalism may perhaps already suggest, Lane's intent is to refute the all-too frequent—and granted, unfair—criticism that Bourdieu's work is "intrinsically resistant to social change"(5). While Bourdieu's political activism and visibility in the media from the early 1990s on clearly attest to the importance he granted issues of social change, Lane argues that the central place they occupy in the entirety of his writings has largely gone unnoticed. Against the critical tendency to reduce all thought produced during "France's transition to late capitalism" (6) to a single postmodern denominator, Lane presents Bourdieu as a resolutely modern thinker. He views Bourdieu's writing —void, as it is, of the postmodern proclamations concerning the end of reason, history and science—as a site of production of rational, scientific tools for the analysis of particular historical fields.

Lane's book, however, does not really represent an attempt on his part to "take up his [Bourdieu's] ideas and concepts and attempt to apply them in new areas of enquiry" (194, my emphasis). Rather, it seeks to "provide a critical and objective assessment of [Bourdieu's] theoretical apparatus" (ibid.) by tracing its development in the national social-intellectual context in which it emerged, and by situating Bourdieu, viewed here primarily as a theoretician of social change, among other prominent French thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. Centered on those case studies most likely to shed light on Bourdieu's views concerning social change, this intellectual biography follows a "broadly chronological and thematic approach, tracing the development of Bourdieu's thought from his earliest to his most recent work" (7).

Chapter 1, "Peasants into Revolutionaries?," draws from Bourdieu's lesser-known writings on Algeria, establishing his positions on colonization and revolution at the time of the war of independence and comparing them with those of other political thinkers of the period, including Althusser, Fanon and Sartre. Chapter 2, "Frenchmen into Consumers?," focuses on research Bourdieu published in the 1960s, including "Celibacy and the Peasant Condition," Photography, and The Love of Art. Lane identifies the issue of class and culture, seen through the prism of France's postwar modernization, as a central preoccupation in Bourdieu's work, its main object being to refute the dyad "modernization= mass-culture=cultural democratization" that André Malraux's politics of art for the people (Maisons de la Culture) popularized at the time. Concurrently, as Lane observes, Bourdieu's insistence on testing theory through empirical research already sets him apart from less empirically oriented researchers, and, in particular, from semioticians such as Lefebvre, Morin, Touraine and Barthes.

The topic of cultural democratization is further developed in Chapter 3, "Universities," this time with a focus on Bourdieu's writings on education, including The Inheritors, Academic Discourse, Reproduction, and Homo Academicus. Here Lane calls attention to a paradoxon which a number of critics have commented—that is, the difficulty of reconciling Bourdieu's radical critique of the French public education system—viewed, on the one hand, as a system that reproduces and legitimizes existing social forms—with his "striking residual faith in the ideals of the French republican tradition" (56), which leads him, conversely, to view public instruction as "'the royal road to the democratization of culture'"(70). The chapter ends with a discussion of "Intellectual Field and Creative Project," an analysis of the Barthes/Picard affair in which Bourdieu experimented with the concept of field. Acknowledging the limits of his thematic critical enterprise, Lane then argues that "by turning to an analysis of the 'theory of practice' which Bourdieu elaborated in his anthropological studies of Kabylia, it will be possible to...