lectures delivered overyears at the College de France expose the state and our abiding belief in it as ayear old political fiction brought to life by its many agents through their collective acts done in the name of the state.
If this sounds tautological, it is the state exists because we act as if it does, Its power is dispersed through rituals and routines that may seem innocuous or inevitable the calendar, geography, spelling, licenses, disciplines taught in school as discrete knowledges, housing practices, taxes but that make its subjects serve it and those who have access to its symbolic capital.
To read the state at this level where it is brought into being in both long range and intimate day to day ways requires Weber, Marx and Durkheim to bear.
What is the nature of the modern state How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life
In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions.
Modifying Max Webers famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence.
The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life.
The collective fiction of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.
While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieus work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory.
The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field.
This text also shows another Bourdieu, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development, While revealing the illusions of state thought designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an antiinstitutional mood that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order.
At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.
While criticizing the conventional approaches to state including Weberian, institutional and particularly Marxist approaches Bourdieu mainly addresses the ways of analysing the state and suggests an ethno methodological approach as a way to analyse this “unthinkable object”.
At least you have to ask anthropological, ethno methodological questions together with the global questions to have adequate questions on the state p,. State is primarily a legitimator,
çok iyi. Sempre que me debruço sobre Bourdieu chego à mesma conclusão: se foi cedo demais, E essa série de aulas é prova definitiva de quão inteligente e complexo sem tender ao complicado o pensamento sempre em movimento, digase de passagem de Pierre Bourdieu sempre foi.
Sobre o Estado é mais do que uma coleção de palestras, é uma chance de espiar o que ainda poderia ser caso o sociólogo ainda estivesse vivo.
Leitura obrigatória, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life.
His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions, He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss.
A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian
Meditations, Bourdieu rejected the ide Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life.
His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions, He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss.
A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre, His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position.
His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures.
In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual see structure and agency, sitelink.