Connecting Theory with Practice: Lessons from Bourdieu

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Notes

1 According to Bourdieu, these properties endowed those who possessed them with the precocity, ambition, audacity and enthusiasm that enabled them to take lead in the debates for reform. However, they remain socially determined dispositions and include: the high economic and professional status of their families; their diverse educational qualifications often obtained abroad; the opportunity to converse with established personalities by participating on ‘elite bodies’ such as the reform commissions; their technical knowledge which relies on rationalised, formalised procedures that are quick and straightforward, and thus challenges the practical knowledge of people and regulations that was required of administrators in the old regime and depends on seniority and experience.

2 Bourdieu argues that one of the consequences of this change in the social order appears to be the continuous suffering of the petite bourgeoisie. As they strive to live up to a new system of needs which values property and the apparent ‘freedom’ it offers, and which is imposed not only by policy-makers’ decisions, but also by builders’ and realtors’ selling strategies (and glorified by game shows, as Bourdieu observes!), they end up living beyond their means and become dependent on bank credit and sanctions (I would add bank failures as a reminder of the current financial crisis). Moreover, this leads to a ‘domestication’ of people’s aspirations and plans at the expense of collective projects of political struggle that would reveal class sufferings and place the social order under scrutiny in the public sphere. Ironically, reform was suggested and pursued in the first place to deal with the social inequalities produced by the prior regime, while the new social order actually fails to confront this problem.