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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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 Weber's 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 D 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 Bourdieu's 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 'anti-institutional 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.
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Editors’ note
Notes
YEAR 1989–1990
Lecture of 18 January 1990
An unthinkable object
The state as a neutral site
The Marxist tradition
The calendar and the structure of temporality
State categories
Acts of state
The private-home market and the state
The Barre commission on housing
Notes
Lecture of 25 January 1990
The theoretical and the empirical
State commissions and stagings
The social construction of public problems
The state as viewpoint on viewpoints
Official marriage
Theory and theory effects
The two meanings of the word ‘state’
Transforming the particular into the universal
The obsequium
Institutions as ‘organized fiduciary’
Genesis of the state. Difficulties of the undertaking
Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology
The state and the sociologist
Notes
Lecture of 1 February 1990
The rhetoric of the official
The public and the official
The universal other and censorship
The ‘legislator as artist’
The genesis of public discourse
Public discourse and the imposition of form
Public opinion
Notes
Lecture of 8 February 1990
The concentration of symbolic resources
Sociological reading of Franz Kafka
An untenable research programme
History and sociology
Shmuel Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires
Perry Anderson’s two books
The problem of the three routes according to Barrington Moore
Notes
Lecture of 15 February 1990
The official and the private
Sociology and history: genetic structuralism
Genetic history of the state
Game and field
Anachronism and the illusion of the nominal
The two faces of the state
Notes
YEAR 1990–1991
Lecture of 10 January 1991
Historical approach and genetic approach
Research strategy
Housing policy
Interactions and structural relations
Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization
The effect of ‘that’s the way it is …’ and the closing of possibilities
The space of possibilities
The example of spelling
Notes
Lecture of 17 January 1991
Reminder of the course’s approach
The two meanings of the word ‘state’: state as administration, state as territory
The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle
Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias
Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly
Notes
Lecture of 24 January 1991
Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint
Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms
Notes
Lecture of 31 January 1991
Reply to questions
Cultural archaisms and economic transformations
Culture and national unity: the case of Japan
Bureaucracy and cultural integration
National unification and cultural domination
Notes
Lecture of 7 February 1991
Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power
Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning
The state as producer of principles of classification
Belief effect and cognitive structures
The coherence effect of state symbolic systems
The school timetable as a state construction
The producers of doxa
Notes
Lecture of 14 February 1991
Sociology, an esoteric science with an exoteric air
Professionals and lay people
The state structures the social order
Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy
Transmutation of private into public: the appearance of the modern state in Europe
Notes
Lecture of 21 February 1991
Logic of the genesis and emergence of the state: symbolic capital
The stages of the process of concentration of capital
The dynastic state
The state as a power over powers
Concentration and dispossession of species of capital: the example of physical force capital
Constitution of a central economic capital and construction of an autonomous economic space
Notes
Lecture of 7 March 1991
Reply to questions: conformity and consensus
Concentration processes of the species of capital: resistances
The unification of the juridical market
The constitution of an interest in the universal
The state viewpoint and totalization: informational capital
Concentration of cultural capital and national construction
‘Natural nobility’ and state nobility
Notes
Lecture of 14 March 1991
Digression: an overthrow in the intellectual field
The double face of the state: domination and integration
Jus loci and jus sanguinis
Unification of the market in symbolic goods
Analogy between the religious field and the cultural field
Notes
YEAR 1991–1992
Lecture of 3 October 1991
A model of the transformations of the dynastic state
The notion of reproduction strategies
The notion of a system of reproduction strategies
The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies
The ‘king’s house’
Juridical logic and practical logic of the dynastic state
Objectives of the next lecture
Notes
Lecture of 10 October 1991
The ‘house’ model against historical finalism
The stakes in historical research on the state
The contradictions of the dynastic state
A tripartite structure
Notes
Lecture of 24 October 1991
Recapitulation of the logic of the course
Family reproduction and state reproduction
Digression on the history of political thought
The historical role of jurists in the process of state construction
Differentiation of power and structural corruption: an economic model
Notes
Lecture of 7 November 1991
Preamble: the pitfalls of communication in social science
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 1: the ambiguous power of sub-bureaucrats
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 2: the ‘pure’
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 3: double game and double ‘I’
The genesis of the bureaucratic space and the invention of the public
Notes
Lecture of 14 November 1991
Construction of the republic and construction of the nation
The constitution of the public in the light of an English treatise on constitutional law
The use of royal seals: the chain of warrants
Notes
Lecture of 21 November 1991
Reply to a question on the public/private contrast
The transmutation of private into public: a non-linear process
The genesis of the meta-field of power: differentiation and dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic authorities
A research programme on the French Revolution
Dynastic principle versus juridical principle as seen through the lit de justice
Methodological digression: the kitchen of political theories
Juridical struggles as symbolic struggles for power
The three contradictions of jurists
Notes
Lecture of 28 November 1991
History as a stake in struggles
The juridical field: a historical approach
Functions and functionaries
The state as fictio juris
Juridical capital as linguistic capital and mastery of practice
Jurists face the church: a corporation acquires autonomy
Reformation, Jansenism and juridism
The public: a reality without precedent that keeps coming into being
Notes
Lecture of 5 December 1991
Programme for a social history of political ideas and the state
Interest in disinterestedness
Jurists and the universal
The (false) problem of the French Revolution
The state and the nation
The state as ‘civil religion’
Nationality and citizenship: contrast between the French and German models
Struggles between interests and struggles between unconscious forms in political debate
Notes
Lecture of 12 December 1991
The construction of political space: the parliamentary game
Digression: television in the new political game
From the paper state to the real state
Domesticating the dominated: the dialectic of discipline and philanthropy
The theoretical dimension of state construction
Questions for a conclusion
Notes
APPENDICES
Course summaries as published in the Annuaire of the Collège de France
1989–1990
1990–1991
1991–1992
Position of the lectures on the state in Pierre Bourdieu’s work
Notes
Bibliography
1 Books and articles on the state, the field of power or the history of political thought
2 Books and articles not directly bearing on the state
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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On the State
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992
Pierre Bourdieu
Edited byPatrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine Rivière
Translated by David Fernbach
polity
First published as Sur l’État © Éditions Raisons d’Agir/Éditions du Seuil, 2012
This English edition © Polity Press, 2014
This book is supported by the Institut Français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3391-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
The editors would like to thank Gabrielle Balazs, Jérôme Bourdieu, Pascale Casanova, Christophe Charle, Olivier Christin, Yvette Delsaut, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Gilles L’Hôte, Pierre Rimbert and Gisèle Sapiro for their valuable comments which have made it possible to clarify certain passages in the lectures, and in particular Loïc Wacquant for his close reading of the text.
Editors’ note
Establishing the text of Pierre Bourdieu’s lectures given at the Collège de France required a number of editorial choices. These lectures form a lattice of written texts, oral commentaries and more or less improvised reflections on his own approach and on the conditions that led him to present this. The material for the lectures was a mixture of manuscript notes, extracts from special presentations and marginal notes on books and photocopies. Bourdieu’s remarks on the conditions in which his teaching was received, by a large and very varied audience in the big amphitheatre of the Collège de France,1 show how his lectures cannot simply be reduced to the written versions of them that he left, given that they could take unexpected turns as they proceeded, depending on his perception of audience reactions.
One solution, which would have had the apparent merit of neutrality and formal fidelity to the author, would have been to publish a literal raw transcription of the whole lecture course. But reproducing the spoken word would not have been enough to preserve its properties, i.e. the whole pedagogic work conducted during each lecture. Nor was the text pronounced that of the ‘published’ version, as we have been able to verify in the case of a number of lectures whose retranscriptions had been substantially reworked, sometimes even completely reshaped, for conversion into articles published in scholarly journals. In fact, the form explicitly chosen in the lectures is closer to the logic of scientific discovery than to that of a perfectly arranged written exposition of research results.
If the editors clearly cannot substitute for the author after his demise, and write in his place the book that he would have made on the basis of his lecture course, they can try to ensure that the properties bound up with the spoken character of the exposition are preserved as far as possible – which presupposes that they should be detectable and perceived, and conversely, that the effects specific to the transcription should be reduced as far as possible. The editors have also had to bear in mind that this publication, without replacing that which the author would have conceived, has to give the work that it continues its full force and necessity. The transcription accordingly seeks to avoid two reefs, literalness and literariness. And if Bourdieu always recommended people to refer to his writings to understand what he was saying,2 he also took advantage of oral delivery and the freedom of expression this afforded, vis-à-vis an audience that he knew were already familiar with his work, to raise implications and go over his line of argument and presentation.
There is a paragraph in The Weight of the World, headed ‘The risks of writing’, in which Bourdieu analyses the transition from oral discourse to written text as ‘a genuine translation or even an interpretation’.3 And he reminds his reader that ‘mere punctuation, the placing of a comma’ can ‘govern the whole meaning of a sentence’. The publication of these lectures thus seeks to reconcile two contrary but not contradictory demands: fidelity and readability. The inevitable ‘infidelities’ that are inherent to any transcription (and, more generally, to any change of medium) are undoubtedly here, as in the interviews that Bourdieu analysed in The Weight of the World, the ‘condition for true fidelity’, in his own expression.
The transcription of these lecture courses at the Collège de France respects procedures that Bourdieu himself applied when he revised those of his lectures or seminars that he went on to publish: minor stylistic corrections, tidying of awkward passages in spoken discourse (interjections, repetitions, etc.). Some obscurities and inexact constructions have been corrected. Where digressions remained within the theme being developed they have been noted by dashes; where they involved a break in the line of argument they have been placed in parentheses; and where they were too long, they have been made into a separate section. The division into sections and paragraphs, as well as subtitles, punctuation and notes giving references and cross-references, are those of the editors, likewise the subject index. The bibliographic references given in footnotes are those of Bourdieu himself, and have been completed when they gave insufficient information. Some have been added to facilitate understanding of the discourse: explanations, cross-references, implicit or explicit reference to texts that continue the reflection. The reader can also consult the list of books, articles and working documents that Bourdieu drew on throughout the course, and that has been reconstituted on the basis of his working notes and his many reading files.
Part of the material in these lectures was subsequently reworked and published by Bourdieu himself in the form of articles or chapters of books. These have in all cases been indicated. As an appendix to the lectures we reproduce the course summaries published each year in the Annuaire of the Collège de France.
These three years of lectures on the state have been selected to commence the publication of Bourdieu’s Collège de France courses because, as can be seen from the ‘position of the lectures’ at the end of the present volume,4 they make up an essential piece in the construction of Bourdieu’s sociology, but one rarely seen. The following volumes will complete the full publication of his lectures over the next few years, in the form of books on autonomous problematics.
Notes
1
. See below, pp. 113, 124, 177, 280.
2
. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Prologue’,
Sociology in Question
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1993).
3
. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Understanding’, Pierre Bourdieu (ed.),
The Weight of the World
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 622.
4
. See below, pp. 378–81.
Year 1989–1990
Lecture of 18 January 1990
An unthinkable object
The state as neutral site
The Marxist tradition
The calendar and the structure of temporality
State categories
Acts of state
The private-home market and the state
The Barre commission on housing
An unthinkable object
When we study the state, we must be on guard more than ever against ‘prenotions’ in the Durkheimian sense, against received ideas and spontaneous sociology. To sum up the analyses I gave in previous years’ lecture courses, and particularly the historical analysis of the relationship between sociology and the state, I noted that we risked applying to the state a ‘state thinking’, and I insisted on the fact that our thinking, the very structures of consciousness by which we construct the social world and the particular object that is the state, are very likely the product of the state itself. By a procedural reflex, a professional effect, each time I have tackled a new object what I was doing appeared to me to be perfectly justified, and I would say that the further I advance in my work on the state, the more convinced I am that, if we have a particular difficulty in thinking this object, it is because it is – and I weigh my words – almost unthinkable. If it is so easy to say easy things about this object, that is precisely because we are in a certain sense penetrated by the very thing we have to study. I have previously tried to analyse the public space, the world of public office, as a site where the values of disinterestedness are officially recognized, and where, to a certain extent, agents have an interest in disinterestedness.1
These two themes [public space and disinterestedness] are extremely important, since I believe that they bring to light how before arriving at a correct conception – if this is indeed possible – we must break through a series of screens and representations, the state being – in so far as it has an existence – a principle of production, of legitimate representation of the social world. If I had to give a provisional definition of what is called ‘the state’, I would say that the sector of the field of power, which may be called ‘administrative field’ or ‘field of public office’, this sector that we particularly have in mind when we speak of ‘state’ without further precision, is defined by possession of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence. Already several years ago,2 I made an addition to the famous definition of Max Weber, who defined the state [as the] ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’,3 which I corrected by adding ‘monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence’, inasmuch as the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for possession of the exercise of the monopoly of physical violence itself. In other words, my definition, as I see it, underlies Weber’s definition. But it still remains abstract, above all if you do not have the context in which I elaborated it. These are provisional definitions in order to try to reach at least a kind of provisional agreement as to what I am speaking about, since it is very hard to speak about something without at least spelling out what one is speaking about. They are provisional definitions designed to be improved and corrected.
The state as a neutral site
The state may be defined as a principle of orthodoxy, that is, a hidden principle that can be grasped only in the manifestations of public order, understood simultaneously as physical order, the opposite of disorder, anarchy and civil war, for example. A hidden principle that can be grasped in the manifestations of public order understood in both the physical and the symbolic sense. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, makes a distinction between logical conformity and moral conformity.4 The state, as it is commonly understood, is the foundation of both the logical and the moral conformity of the social world. Logical conformity, in Durkheim’s sense, consists in the fact that the agents of the social world have the same logical perceptions – the immediate agreement established between people who have the same categories of thought, of perception, of construction of reality. Moral conformity is agreement on a certain number of values. Readings of Durkheim have always stressed moral conformity, forgetting the logical conformity that, in my view, is its foundation.
This provisional definition would consist in saying that the state is that which founds the logical conformity and moral conformity of the social world, and in this way, the fundamental consensus on the meaning of the social world that is the very precondition of conflict over the social world. In other words, for conflict over the social world to be possible, a kind of agreement is needed on the grounds of disagreement and on their modes of expression. In the political field, for example, the genesis of that sub-universe of the social world that is the field of high public office may be seen as the gradual development of a kind of orthodoxy, a set of rules of the game that are broadly laid down, on the basis of which a communication is established within the social world that may be a communication in and through conflict. To extend this definition, we can say that the state is the principle of the organization of consent as adhesion to the social order, to the fundamental principles of the social order, that it is the foundation, not necessarily of a consensus, but of the very existence of exchanges that lead to a dissension.
This procedure is a little dangerous, in that it may appear to go back to what is the initial definition of the state, the definition that states give themselves and that was repeated in certain classical theories such as those of Hobbes and Locke, the state in this initial belief being an institution designed to serve the common good, the government serving the good of the people. To a certain extent, the state would be a neutral site or, more exactly – to use Leibniz’s analogy according to which God is the geometral of all antagonistic perspectives – the point of view overlooking all points of view, which is no longer a point of view since it is in relation to it that all points of view are organized. This view of the state as a quasi-God underlies the tradition of classical theory, and is the basis of the spontaneous sociology of the state that is expressed in what is sometimes called administrative science, that is, the discourse that agents of the state produce about the state, a veritable ideology of public service and public good.
The Marxist tradition
This ordinary representation that my definition would appear to repeat – though you will see it is very different in reality – is opposed in a whole series of traditions, particularly the Marxist tradition, by an antagonistic representation that is a kind of reversal of the primary definition: the state is not an apparatus oriented to the common good, it is an apparatus of constraint, of maintenance of public order but to the benefit of the dominant. In other words, the Marxist tradition does not pose the problem of the existence of the state, resolving it right from the start by defining the functions it fulfils; from Marx to Gramsci, to Althusser and beyond, it always insists on characterizing the state by what it does, and by the people for whom it does what it does, but without investigating the actual structure of the mechanisms deemed to produce its foundation. Clearly, it is possible to emphasize more strongly the economic functions of the state or its ideological functions: to speak of ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci)5 or ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser);6 but the accent is always placed on the functions, and the question of the being and acting of this thing designated as the state is sidestepped.
It is at this point that the difficult questions arise. This critical view of the state is often accepted without discussion. If it is easy to say easy things about the state, it is because, both by position and by tradition (I have in mind, for example, Alain’s famous book Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs),7 the producers and receivers of discourse on the state like to have a somewhat anarchistic disposition, a disposition of socially established rebellion against authority. I have in mind, for example, certain types of theories that denounce discipline and constraint, and enjoy great success, even being destined for eternal success because they fall in with adolescent rebellion against constraints and disciplines, and flatter an initial disposition towards institutions, what I call an anti-institutional mood,8 which is particularly strong at certain historic moments and in certain social groups. Owing to this fact, they are unconditionally accepted, whereas in reality, I would say, they are only the pure and simple reversal of the ordinary definition, having in common with this definition that they reduce the question of the state to the question of function, substituting for the divine state a diabolical state, substituting for ‘optimistic functionalism’ – the state as instrument of consensus, as a neutral site on which conflicts are managed – a diabolical state, diabolus in machina, a state that always operates by what I call a ‘pessimistic functionalism’9 in the service of the dominant, in a manner that is more or less direct or sophisticated.
In the logic of hegemony, the agents of the state are conceived as being in the service not of the universal and the public good, as they claim, but of the economically dominant and the symbolically dominant, and at the same time in their own service, that is, the agents of the state serve the economically and symbolically dominant, and serve themselves by serving. That comes down to explaining what the state does, what it is, on the basis of its functions. I believe that this mistake, which we can call functionalist and which is even found with structural-functionalists such as the Althusserians, who were in fact very close to the optimistic structural-functionalists – Parsons and his successors – was there already in the Marxist theory of religion, which amounts to describing an authority such as religion by its function, without asking what structure is needed to fulfil these functions. In other words, nothing is learned about the mechanism by simply investigating its functions.
(One of my difficulties, in seeking to understand what we call the state, is that I am obliged to say in traditional language something that goes against the meta-language, and provisionally make use of this old language in order to destroy what it conveys. But if I were to substitute each time the vocabulary I am trying to construct – field of power, etc. – this would no longer be intelligible. I constantly ask myself, especially before I teach, if I will ever be able to say what I mean, if it is reasonable to believe this … That is a very particular difficulty, which I believe is characteristic of scientific discourse on the social world.)
By way of a provisional synthesis, I would say that it is inasmuch as the state is a principle of orthodoxy, of consensus on the meaning of the world, of very conscious consent on the meaning of the world, that it fulfils, as I see it, certain of the functions that the Marxist tradition ascribes to it. In other words, it is as orthodoxy, as collective fiction, as a well-founded illusion – and I take up here the definition that Durkheim applies to religion,10 the analogies between the state and religion being considerable – that the state is able to fulfil its functions of social preservation, preservation of the conditions of capital accumulation – as certain contemporary Marxists put it.
The calendar and the structure of temporality
In other words, to sum up in advance what I am going to tell you, I would say that the state is the name that we give to the hidden, invisible principles – indicating a kind of deus absconditus – of the social order, and at the same time of both physical and symbolic domination, likewise of physical and symbolic violence. In order to make this logical function of moral conformity understandable, I need only develop an example that I see as suited to making what I have said up to now apparent. There is nothing more ordinary than the calendar. The republican calendar with its civic festivals and public holidays is something completely trivial, to which we do not [pay] attention. We accept it as a matter of course. Our perception of temporality is organized as a function of the structures of this public time. In Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire,11 Maurice Halbwachs recalls that the foundations of every evocation of memory are to be sought in the direction of what he calls the social contexts of memory, that is, those specifically social reference points in relation to which we organize our private life. Here is a fine example of the public at the very heart of the private: at the very heart of our memory we find the state, the civic festivals, secular or religious, and we find different categories of specific calendar, the school calendar or the religious calendar. We thus discover a whole set of structures of social temporality marked by social reference points and collective activities. We find it at the very heart of our personal consciousness.
It would be possible to repeat here the analyses of storytelling behaviour, old but still valid, that Pierre Janet proposed:12 it is clear that when we tell a tale that implies a time dimension, when we do history, we take our bearings from divisions that are themselves the product of history, and which have become the very principles of evocation of history. Halbwachs [noted that] two individuals will say: ‘In such-and-such a year I was in the sixième class, I was at such-and-such a place, we were at school together …’ If two social subjects are able to communicate to one another the time they have experienced, that is, a time that in Bergsonian logic is said to be incommensurable and incommunicable, it is on the basis of this agreement over the temporal reference points which find objective inscription in the form of the calendar of public holidays, of ‘solemnizations’, anniversary ceremonies and in consciousness, and are also inscribed in the memory of individual agents. All this is completely bound up with the state. Revolutions revise the official calendars – ‘official’ meaning universal within the limits of a definite society, as opposed to private. We can have private calendars, but these are themselves situated in relation to the universal calendars; they are notches in the intervals marked by the universal calendar, within the limits of a society. You can do the following amusing exercise: take the public holidays of all the European countries, and the defeats of some are the victories of others … calendars are not completely superimposable, Catholic religious festivals have less weight in Protestant countries …
There is a whole structure of temporality, and I believe that, if one day the Brussels technocrats want to do something serious, they will inevitably work on calendars. At that moment, we shall discover that extremely deep mental habits are attached to festivals, habits on which people put much store. We shall perceive that these calendars, that seem a matter of course, mark social conquests: 1 May is a date that many people will not so easily give up, while for others the Feast of the Assumption is a key date. Remember the debate that was triggered by the intention of cancelling the 8 May celebration. We buy a calendar each year, we buy something that is a matter of course, we buy a completely fundamental principle of structuration that is one of the foundations of social existence, and makes it possible for example to make appointments. The same can be done for the hours of the day. There is consensus about these, and I don’t know any anarchist who does not change his clock when we go over to summer time, who does not accept as a matter of course a whole set of things that relate, in the last analysis, to state power, as is clear, moreover, when different states are at odds over something apparently anodyne.
This is one of the things I had in mind when I said that the state is one of the principles of public order; and public order is not simply the police and the army, as the Weberian definition suggests – monopoly of physical violence. Public order rests on consent: the fact that people get up on time presupposes that clock time is accepted. Sartre’s very fine analysis, a completely intellectual one, about ‘I am free, I can decide not to go to work, I have the freedom not to get out of bed’, is wrong despite being quite seductive. Apart from the fact that this analysis implies that everyone is free not to accept the idea of clock time, what it tells us more profoundly is that the fact of accepting the idea of clock time is already something quite extraordinary. Not all societies, in all countries, at all times, have had a public time. One of the first acts of civil bureaucracies, of the clerks,13 historically, when a number of towns federated together or when several tribes combined, was the establishment of a public time; the founders of states, if it is allowable to construct such remote genealogies by anthropological comparison, were faced with this problem. (In working on societies without the state, without that thing which we call the state, for example segmentary societies in which there are clans or groups of clans, but no central organ holding the monopoly of physical violence, no prisons, there is among other problems that of violence: how is violence to be controlled when there is no authority above families engaged in a vendetta?)
Collecting calendars is an anthropological tradition: the agrarian calendar of peasants, but also the calendars of women, of young people, of children, etc. These calendars are not necessarily attuned in the same sense as our calendars. They are approximately in tune: the calendar of children’s games, the calendars of young boys, young girls, adolescents, young shepherds, adult men, adult women – cooking or women’s work – all these calendars are approximately in tune. But no one took a sheet of paper – the state is bound up with writing – so as to put all these calendars side by side and say: ‘Look, there’s a little discrepancy here, the summer solstice with …’ There is not yet a synchronization of all activities. Now this synchronization is a tacit condition for the proper functioning of the social world; it would be useful to calculate all the people who live by maintaining the order of time, who are partly involved in maintaining the order of time, charged with governing temporality.
If you think back on some very well-known texts such as Lucien Febvre’s book on Rabelais,14 you will see that the period when what we are going to call the state was established reveals some interesting things about the social usage of temporality, the collective regulation of time, which we consider a matter of course, with clocks striking more or less at the same time, and everyone having a watch. All this is not so old. A world in which this public time is not established, institutionalized, guaranteed not only by objective structures – calendars, watches – but also by mental structures, people wanting to have a watch and being in the habit of consulting it, making appointments and arriving on time. This kind of accounting of time, which presupposes both public time and a public relationship to time, is a relatively recent invention that stands in relation with the construction of state structures.
This is very far from the Gramscian topoi on the state and hegemony; which does not rule out that those who govern the clocks or who are governed by them are not privileged in relation to those who are less governed. We must start by analysing these anthropologically fundamental things in order to understand the true functioning of the state. This detour, which may seem to break with the critical violence of the Marxist tradition, seems to me to be absolutely indispensable.
State categories
The same thing can be done for public space, but giving the term a different sense from the somewhat trivial one that Habermas gives it, and that everyone repeats.15 A quite fundamental analysis would have to be made as to what is the structure of a space in which the public and the private confront one another, in which the public square is opposed not just to the private home but also to the palace. There are studies of this differentiation of urban space. In other words, what we call the state, what we point to confusedly when we think of the state, is a kind of principle of public order, understood not only in its evident physical forms but also in its unconscious symbolic forms, which apparently are deeply self-evident. One of the most general functions of the state is the production and canonization of social classifications.
It is no accident that there is a link between the state and statistics. Historians say that the state begins with the appearances of censuses, investigations of property with a view to taxation, since, in order to impose taxes, it is necessary to know what people possess. They start from the relationship between the census and the censor who lays down legitimate principles of division, principles so self-evident that they do not come into discussion. It is possible to discuss about how social classes are divided, but not the idea that there are divisions at all. The occupational categories defined by the INSEE,16 for example, are a typical product of the state. This is not just an instrument to make measuring possible, enabling those who govern to know the governed. The categories are also legitimate ones, a nomos, a principle of division that is universally recognized within the limits of a society, about which no discussion is needed; it is printed on one’s identity card, or on the payslip which says ‘third grade, such-and-such a point on the scale’. People are quantified and coded by the state; they have a state identity. The functions of the state clearly include the production of legitimate social identity; in other words, even if we do not agree with these identities, we have to put up with them. Certain social behaviours, such as rebellion, may be determined by the very categories that are rebelled against by those who rebel. That is one of the major explanatory principles in sociology: individuals who have difficulties with the educational system are often determined by their very difficulties, and certain intellectual careers are entirely determined by an unfortunate relationship with the educational system, that is, by an effort to give the lie, without knowing it, to a legitimate identity imposed by the state.
The state is this well-founded illusion, this place that exists essentially because people believe that it exists. This illusory reality, collectively validated by consensus, is the site that you are headed towards when you go back from a certain number of phenomena – educational qualifications, professional qualifications or calendar. Proceeding step by step, you arrive at a site that is the foundation of all this. This mysterious reality exists through its effects and through the collective belief in its existence, which lies at the origin of these effects. It is something that you cannot lay your hands on, or tackle in the way that people from the Marxist tradition do when they say ‘the state does this’, ‘the state does that’. I could cite you kilometres of texts with the word state as the subject of actions and proposals. That is a very dangerous fiction, which prevents us from properly understanding the state. By way of preamble, therefore, what I want to say is: be careful, all sentences that have the state as subject are theological sentences – which does not mean that they are false, inasmuch as the state is a theological entity, that is, an entity that exists by way of belief.
Acts of state
To escape theology, to be able to offer a radical critique of this adhesion to the being of the state that is inscribed in our mental structures, we can substitute for the state the acts that can be called acts of ‘state’ – putting ‘state’ in quotes – in other words political acts intended to have effects in the social world. There is a politics recognized as legitimate, if only because no one questions the possibility of acting otherwise, because it is unquestioned. These legitimate political acts owe their effectiveness to their legitimacy, and to the belief in the existence of the principle that underlies them.
I will give a single example, that of a primary school inspector who goes to visit a school. He has to perform an act of a quite particular type: he goes to inspect. He represents the central authority. In the great preindustrial empires, you see the appearance of bodies of inspectors. The problem that is raised right away is that of knowing who will inspect the inspectors? Who will guard the guardians? This is a fundamental problem of all states. Some people are charged with going to look in the name of authority; they have a mandate. But who gives them this mandate? The state. The inspector who goes to visit a school has an authority that inhabits his person. [As the sociologists Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer have written:] ‘States state.’17 They make ‘statements’, they lay down ‘statutes’, and a statement is what the inspector will deliver.
I have analysed previously the difference between a private insult and an insulting judgement made by an authorized person.18 In school exercise books, teachers who forget the limits of their responsibility deliver insulting judgements; there is something criminal about these authorized and legitimate insults.19 If you say to your son, your brother or your boyfriend: ‘You’re an idiot!’, that is a singular judgement delivered on a single individual by a single individual, and therefore reversible. Whereas if a teacher says, in a euphemistic way, ‘Your son is an idiot’, this becomes a judgement that has to be reckoned with. An authorized judgement has the whole force of the social order behind it, the force of the state. One of the modern functions of the teaching system is to award certificates of social identity, certificates of the quality that most contributes to defining social identity today, in other words intelligence – in the social sense of the term.20
Here then we have examples of acts of state: these are authorized acts, endowed with an authority that, by a series of delegations, goes back step by step to an ultimate site, like Aristotle’s god: the state. Who guarantees the teacher? What guarantees the teacher’s judgement? A similar regression can also be traced in quite other domains. If you take the judgements of justice, it is still more evident; similarly, if you take the investigating report of a policeman, the regulations drawn up by a commission or laid down by a minister. In all these cases, we are faced with acts of categorization; the etymology of the word ‘category’ – from categorein – means publicly accusing, even insulting; state categorein publicly accuses with public authority: ‘I publicly accuse you of being guilty’; ‘I publicly certify that you are a university agrégé’; ‘I categorize you’ (the accusation may be positive or negative); ‘I sanction you’, with an authority that authorizes both the judgement and, evidently, the categories according to which the judgement is made. Because what is concealed here is the opposition ‘intelligent/not intelligent’; the question of the pertinence of this opposition is not raised. Here we have the kind of sleight of hand that the social world constantly produces, and that makes life very hard for the sociologist.
To escape from theology is therefore very difficult. But let us return to things on which we certainly agree. You will grant me that the examples I gave are indeed acts of state. They have in common the fact of being actions performed by agents endowed with a symbolic authority, and followed by effects. This symbolic authority refers, step by step, to a kind of illusory community, a kind of ultimate consensus. If these acts obtain consent, if people accept them – even if they rebel, their rebellion presupposes a consent – it is because, at bottom, they consciously or unconsciously participate in a kind of ‘illusory community’ – that is an expression of Marx’s about the state21 – which is the community of belonging to a community that we shall call a nation or a state, in the sense of a set of people recognizing the same universal principles.
Reflection would also be needed on the different dimensions that characterize these acts of state: the ideas of official, public and universal. I have just made a contrast between insult, on the one hand, and authorized and universal judgement, on the other – authorized and universal within the limits of a constituency, a legally defined competence, a nation, certain state frontiers. This judgement may be pronounced openly, as opposed to the judgement of insult, which not only has something unofficial about it, but also something rather shameful, if only because it might be returned. Authorized judgement is thus framed both by its foundation and its form. Among the constraints imposed on those who wield the capacity of official judgement is the necessity to respect the forms that make official judgement genuinely official. There are things to be said about this bureaucratic formalism that Weber opposed to magical formalism, the formalism expressed in a ritual test by uttering a magic formula (‘Open sesame!’). For Weber, bureaucratic formalism has nothing in common with magical formalism: it is not mechanical and arbitrary respect, whose strictness is arbitrary, but rather respect for a form that authorizes because it conforms to norms collectively approved, either tacitly or explicitly.22 In this sense, the state also falls on the side of magic (I said just now that, for Durkheim, religion was a well-founded illusion), but it is a magic quite different from how this is generally conceived. I now want to try and extend this inquiry in two directions.
(As soon as you work on an object from the social world, you always come up against the state and state effects, without necessarily looking for it. Marc Bloch, one of the founders of comparative history, says that in order to raise the problems of comparative history it is necessary to start from the present. In his famous book comparing the French seigneurie and the English manor,23 he starts from the shape of fields in England and in France, and from statistics on the proportion of peasants in France and in England; this is the starting point from which he raises a certain number of questions.)
I am therefore going to try and describe how I encountered the state in my own work; I shall then try to give a description of the historical genesis of this mysterious reality. Better description of the genesis gives a better understanding of the mystery, you see things taking shape by starting from the Middle Ages, by taking the English, French and Japanese examples. I shall have to justify myself about the type of historical work I shall propose to you, work that raises formidable problems that I do not want to tackle naively: methodological preambles will take a great deal of time in relation to substance. And you will say: ‘He’s raised a lot of questions for us but given little in the way of answers …’
The examples I have taken fall into a whole tradition of socio-linguistic or linguistic reflection on the notion of the performative, but at the same time, they risk stopping short at preconstructed representations of what lies behind the state effects.24 So as to try to give an idea of the mechanisms that produce state effects, and to which we attach the idea of state, I shall summarize a study I made several years ago of the single-home market, the production and circulation of that economic good with a symbolic dimension that a house is.25 I want to show, on the basis of this very concrete example, the form under which the state manifests itself. I hesitated a good deal before giving you this example, since I could spend the whole year’s lecture course on this study alone. To a certain extent, the meta-discourse I am going to offer on this work is somewhat absurd, since it assumes that all the detailed meanderings of the work are known. Such are the contradictions of teaching … I do not know how to articulate research, with its rhythm, its demands, and the teaching that I seek to orient in the direction of research.
The single-home market and the state
I undertook this inquiry into the market in single homes with rather ordinary and trivial questions in mind, such as are regularly raised by researchers: Why do people buy rather than rent? Why at a certain point in time do they seek to buy rather than rent? Why do social categories who used not to buy now seek to buy, and what social categories are these? It is said that the total number of owners is rising, but how the rate of increase is differentiated in social space according to classes is not examined. The first thing needed is to observe and measure: that’s what statistics are for. A whole series of questions is raised: who buys, who rents? Who buys what? How do they buy? With what kind of loans? Then you come on to ask: but who produces? How do they produce? How should the sector constructing single homes be described? Are there small craftsmen building one home a year, on the one hand, side by side with big companies linked with enormous banking powers, building three thousand homes a year? Is this the same world? Is there a genuine competition between them? What is the balance of forces? Questions that are classical ones, therefore. The research methods were very varied: interviews with buyers – why buy rather than rent? – observations, the recording of acts of sale and negotiations, contracts between buyer and seller, study of sellers and their strategies, through to listening to the representations that the buyers came up with [vis-à-vis] the sellers.
What is interesting is that gradually, by a kind of regression imposed by the logic of the inquiry itself, the centre of research shifted: what was initially a study of transactions, the constraints weighing on these transactions, the economic and cultural conditions determining the choice, the study of a system of factors explaining the choice between becoming a renter or a buyer, and a buyer of this rather than that, a renter of this rather than that – this investigation gradually dwindled to the point that in the final text it makes up only 5 per cent, that is, scarcely a dozen pages. The centre of research interest shifted to the institutional conditions of production, both of the supply of homes and of their demand. It became very quickly apparent that, in order to understand what happens in the transaction between a single seller and a single buyer – a meeting that ultimately is apparently random – you have to go back step by step, and at the end of this regression you find the state.
At the Salon de la Maison Individuelle in Paris, a buyer arrives, a little embarrassed, accompanied by his wife and two kids; he asks about a house. He is spoken to politely because he has a wife and two kids, he’s a serious customer … If it was a woman by herself, we know what she would say: ‘I’ll come and look at it with my husband’ – so the salesman does not make a great effort. He says to the couple: ‘Come and sit down.’ We have to spell things out in concrete detail in order to see how the state is involved. At the beginning, I didn’t start with the idea of studying the state: it forced itself on me. In order to understand what happens in this single encounter, you have to do everything that I shall mention very quickly, whereas you would ultimately have to study the French state back to the Middle Ages …
Two people are talking to one another: a salesman who is in a bit of a hurry, who first has to gauge if the man opposite him is a serious customer or not. On the basis of a spontaneous sociology, but a very good one, he knows that the most common buyer is a family with two children. He has to lose as little time as possible, so he has to anticipate. Whether it’s worth the effort, and having determined that it is worth the effort, he also has to accelerate the process. The communication, the structure of the exchange, is very standardized, very stereotyped; it always takes the following form. For a few minutes, the buyer, going by what his friends have said or his mother-in-law on lending him money, asks the salesman a few questions, to try and make him compete with other possible sellers, to try and get information and see if there are any hidden defects. The situation turns round fairly quickly; sometimes, by the third question, the buyer is already hooked. It’s then the salesman’s turn to ask questions; he makes the potential buyer pass a regular examination as to his payment capacities.
It is clear enough that the potential buyer becomes the object of a kind of social assessment; it is his identity as a customer of the bank that is at issue. The salesman often has his arguments ready prepared; that is a characteristic of the bureaucratic situation which is always forgotten, especially if you don’t do empirical research: if you start from the state, as [Nicos] Poulantzas did, you never get to this. The salesman is in a completely asymmetrical relationship to the buyer. For the salesman, the buyer is simply one more in the series, he has seen others and will see others again; he has generic anticipations that are sociologically well-founded, and accordingly he has generic strategies for all sorts, which have been validated by experience. Opposite him, the buyer is experiencing a unique situation, which is unlikely to be repeated. On the one hand the repetitive and on the other the unique; the person on the repetitive side has the advantage both of his accumulated experience and of an experience accumulated by others as well. Sometime he also has at his elbow a vicarious experience of the bureaucratic type, protocols fully prepared, forms, that is, a rational, informational bureaucratic capital that is already considerable. But if we stopped there, we would be forgetting the essential, which is that behind him he also has a considerable force: the power given him by the fact of being the representative of an organization acting in the name of a bank; he is the delegate of a credit institution. What he appears to be doing is selling houses, but in fact he is selling the credit that makes it possible to buy a house.
