Pierre Bourdieu Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Pierre Bourdieu Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist who approached politics sociologically, outside of the perspective of politicians, in order to study the social conditions of its access.

Bourdieu’s interest in politics and sociology began in the mid-1950s, during his military service in Algeria. During this time, he adopted a militant posture toward the necessity of Algerian independence. Neutrality was an impossible position for Bourdieu; he felt that it led to the defense and strengthening of the status quo. An example of his militant attitude is found in his book The Weight of the World (1993), which seeks at once to unveil the suffering of those who are excluded by society and to give them the possibility to understand and express themselves.

According to Bourdieu, sociology has its own habitus (set of physiological, psychological, and social habits) and develops in relation to the position of the same individual in other fields of social life. The political field is one of many in the social world; it is shaped by political agents, individuals, and groups who can produce effects within it. These agents who claim to speak in the name of social groups share the sentiment (tied to their gender, education, and class) that they have the right and the competence to speak and be heard in political matters. This belief is central to their desire to act in the political field.

Bourdieu also found that those who lack political and postsecondary education tend to believe that they do not know enough about politics to have the right to have their voices heard and feel that they do not understand enough to make the right decisions. In this manner, social positions and ideas are reproduced by being defined, one generation after another, by a small group of individuals with the opposite belief.

Bourdieu argued that relations of antagonism and collaboration between representatives within the political field are more important in shaping their allegiances than their relations to the electorate. Politicians commonly confuse their attempts to maintain their influence and power with their attempts to act on behalf of those they can only represent by defending their own position. As a result, when members of social movements attempt to become political agents, they face the difficulty of being heard, but also often are affected by the attempt of their representatives to neutralize them because of the threat they represent to their position in the political field. Representation can then be seen as a form of usurpation of power.

Throughout the 1990s, Bourdieu attempted to give a voice to the social movements in Europe. He advocated for the creation of collectives of intellectuals, such as his own movement centered around the journal Liber-Raisons d’agir. His political interventions followed his suggestion that intellectuals should work together and with social movements to help them in developing a criticism of their situation, expressing their demands, giving them weapons to fight the dominant opinion (i.e., neoliberal ideology), and unveiling its contradictions and its violence. Bourdieu thus highlighted the interdependency of the freedom of intellectuals and of the freedom of all social agents.

Bibliography:

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power, edited and introduced by John B.Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. 1993.
Reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Propos sur le champ politique. Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000.
Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action, edited by Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo, translated by Gregory Elliot. London:Verso, 2008.
Wacquant, Loïc, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics:The Mystery of Ministry. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2005.