The Sociologist as Moraliste : Pierre Bourdieu's Practice of Theory and the French Intellectual Tradition

Pierre Bourdieu is increasingly seen by the media in France and abroad as the new French intellectual star, after Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the mid-1990s, Bourdieu became a vocal defender of the unemployed on the streets of Paris and a denouncer of neoliberal economic doctrine, a Sartrean intellectual in the full sense of the term. According to most commentators, this shift from the library to the street split Bourdieu's trajectory into one of academic sociologist on the one hand, and public activist on the other. Moral values, which seemed absent from Bourdieu's academic work, have taken a central role in his public activism. It is true that in his theory, strategies of resistance to the rule of the dominant classes reproduce more than challenge domination, creating a bleak picture of social reality. In contrast, in his intellectual activity Bourdieu has practically demonstrated the effectiveness of strategies of resistance to domination and globalization. The separation between contemplation and action, theory and practice, the critique of intellectual power and its application, seems too perfect, however. Instead of emphasizing these dichotomies, I would like to suggest here that a specific moral outlook unites the young and the old Bourdieu. It has always been present in Bourdieu's studies, despite their scientific nature. Republican values enabled Bourdieu to switch from a theory of practice to the practice of theory, revealing in the process the ambiguities and contradictions of both his scientific work and political activism. Theory needs ethical grounding to become practice and scientific legitimacy needs a moral basis to be transformed into symbolic power. After a brief discussion of French intellectual politics, I will examine the moral dimension of Bourdieu's theory--especially his concept of habitus--and of his public activism.

French Intellectuals: A Short History of a Cultural Totem

With the Great Revolution the philosophe became the defender of reason. In the 19th century journalists and academics inherited this mission. For many of them, reason served morality, and vice-versa. Indeed, reason and morality merged to such an extent that philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once declared that "the political convictions of French writers are nothing but moral attitudes." ² This is not surprising, as the educated classes were the ones who could determine the content of intellectual value. According to Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock and others, the modern intellectual appeared with the Dreyfus affair. ³ Christophe Charle has argued that the neologism "intellectuals" first appeared in France at the end of the 19th century, and that other European countries copied France's model. ⁴ But scholars have had trouble determining exactly how the intellectuals as a group differ from previous groups of intellectuals in other countries such as Poland and Russia. Surprisingly, Michel Winock mentions as the main criterion "the massive mobilization of those who henceforth would be the intellectuals." ⁵ Through historical discourse, the Dreyfus affair has become an inaugural event and the intellectuals a reference point for French and foreign intellectual and cultural historians. In popular and scholarly writing, this symbolic tour de force transformed Zola and his friends from writers and academics, representatives of the educated classes, into members of a new social group, the intellectuals, which is now a French invention and part of the national cultural heritage. Through this semantic appropriation the notion of the intellectual can only be, at the end of the 20th century, "taken in the sense of the Dreyfus affair," to the extent that some think the term intellectual cannot be used in any other context. ⁶

These processes of national appropriation of the idea of the intellectual and construction of a national mythology were already under way during the Dreyfus affair. After all, France was the country of the Great Revolution, and many considered human rights to be a French invention. The defense of universal values had become a French specialty, and France had...