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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A key feature of those who work for the state, in the legal system and in public services is that they claim to be putting their own personal interests aside and working in a disinterested fashion, for the public good. But is disinterested behaviour possible? Can law be treated as a set of universal rules that are independent of particular interests, or is this mere ideology? Is the state bureaucracy a universal class, as Hegel thought, or a structure that serves the interests of the dominant class, as Marx claimed?
In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1987–88 and 1988–89, Pierre Bourdieu addressed these questions by examining the formation of the legal and bureaucratic fields characteristic of the modern state, uncovering the historical and social conditions that enable a social group to form and find its own interests in the very fact of serving interests that go beyond it. For a disinterested universe to emerge, it needs both the invention of a public service, or a spirit of service to the public cause, and the creation of a social universe in which individuals can pursue a career devoted to public service and be rewarded for it. In other words, it requires a process of specialization whereby autonomous, specific fields become established in the social cosmos within which a special kind of game that follows the rules of disinterest can be played out.
By reconstructing the conditions under which an interest in disinterestedness emerged, Bourdieu sheds new light on the formation of the modern state and legal system and provides a fresh perspective on the many professions in modern societies that are oriented towards the service of the common good.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Year Of 1987–88
Lecture of 10 March 1988
Internal reading, external reading and autonomy
Forgetting the microcosm
The coherence and normativity of the law
The space of works and the space of positions
A canonical text by d’Aguesseau
The invention of the public as a new sovereign
Notes
Lecture of 17 March 1988
Common sense and the feel for the game in a field
The transfiguration of common sense into specialized meanings (sequel)
Producing a love for the game
Two other questions
The double historicization
The Jansenist influence and the problem of self-love
Inventing the public: the oracle effect
Producing the universal with individual interests
Notes
Lecture of 24 March 1988
What is a quotation?
The effect of the social sciences on the social world
From interesting conditions to disinterestedness
The principle of sufficient reason and its suspension
Logical logic and practical logics
Conditions creating interest in disinterestedness
Spontaneous submission to the rules of the field
Genesis of the rules of the juridical field
Business law and pure law
Cross-checking
The force of the ideal
Escaping historicism
Notes
Lecture of 14 April 1988
The claim to be universal
Does a space beyond positions exist?
Two canonical positions
The organicist metaphor
A quasi-divine viewpoint
Durkheim’s lapses
The reinvention of Hegel’s theory
The State, a movement towards unity
Bureaucracy
Durkheim, State sociologist
Notes
Lecture of 21 April 1988
A charitable reading of Marx’s theory of the State
An enchanted vision and a disenchanted vision of the State
The unconscious corporatism of the sociologists
A sociological critique of the social sciences
First false problem: does sociology liberate or manipulate?
Second false problem: continuity or break?
Towards a social history of the social sciences
The ‘prehistory of the social sciences’
The birth of the social sciences in an awkward position
Scientific sociology and France as a special case
The separation of national traditions during the interwar period
The triumphant postwar development
Notes
Year Of 1988–89
Lecture of 19 January 1989
The essays on the State
Disinterestedness is suspect
An inverted world and its genesis
The ghost of economic reality
Understanding the oblates
Two universal observations
Notes
Lecture of 26 January 1989
A plan for an enquiry into the Pechiney affair
A transhistorical sociology of ethical dispositions
The habitus and the Kantian ethic
Notes
Lecture of 2 February 1989
The regulated transgression of the bureaucratic rule
The political field and the bureaucratic field
The categories of technocratic understanding
The notion of profession, a scholarly myth
Defining the concept
Notes
Lecture of 9 February 1989
A sociodicy behind the description of a historical process
The profession, a scholarly myth
Profession, corps and field
The theory of the professions as a negative theory of the State
The school as liberator
Continuity and genesis of the great corps
Notes
Lecture of 16 February 1989
The medical profession and the State
Weber and the ‘patent of education’
State magic, certification, magic and the educational universe
The confinement of the dominant
A programme for research
Notes
Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State: Situating the Lectures of 1987–88 and 1988–89
Approaching the State
The time for law
The origins of sociology
Disinterestedness and the universal
Defending the universal
Notes
Summaries of the Lectures Published in the Annual of the Collège de France
1987–1988: On the State
1988–1989: On the State (sequel)
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Begin Reading
Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State: Situating the Lectures of 1987–88 and 1988–89
Summaries of the Lectures Published in the Annual of the Collège de France
Index
End User License Agreement
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The Interest in Disinterestedness
Lectures at the Collège de France (1987–1989)
Pierre Bourdieu
Edited by Julien Duval
Translated by Peter Collier
polity
First published in French as L’intérêt au désintéressement. Cours au Collège de France 1987–1989 © Éditions Raisons d’agir/Éditions du Seuil, 2022.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
The editor extends his thanks to Louis Gabrysiak and Thibaud Izard for their work in transcribing the lectures, as well as Bruno Ambroise, Johan Heilbron, Louis Pinto and Yves Winkin for their help during the editing of the final text and the notes.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, 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: 978-1-5095-5513-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948032
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 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:politybooks.com
Editorial Note
This book continues and concludes the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s lectures at the Collège de France. A few months after his last lecture at this institution in March 2001, Bourdieu had published a concise version of the last year of his course (2000–1), under the title Science de la science et réflexivité [Science of Science and Reflexivity, 2004].1 After his death, Sur l’État appeared in 2012 [On the State, 2014], followed by Manet. Une révolution symbolique in 2013 [Manet. A Symbolic Revolution, 2017].2 The publication of the ‘Cours de sociologie générale’ that Bourdieu gave during his first five years of teaching at the Collège de France, between April 1982 and June 1986, was then launched, with a first volume combining the lectures of the academic years 1981–82 and 1982–83 issued in 2015, and then a second volume in 2016, containing those of the following three years.3 The lectures given in 1992–93 that Bourdieu had entitled ‘Les fondements sociaux de l’action économique’ were published in 2017.4 Our present volume combines the lectures given in 1987–88 and 1988–89 under the title ‘À propos de l’État’ [On the State]. The first year comprised five sessions, each lasting about 1 hour 50 minutes, which were held weekly on Thursdays at 11am in March and April 1988. The second year collates two lectures given in Lyon5 with five lectures given in Paris on Thursdays in January and February 1989.6
The present edition respects the editorial approach chosen for the publication of the lectures on the State, aiming to reconcile faithfulness to the text with readability.7 The text reproduces the transcription of the lectures as spoken.
As in the previous volumes, the transposition from oral to written has involved some superficial rewriting, which is careful to respect the criteria applied by Bourdieu himself when he revised his own lectures and seminars: stylistic corrections, smoothing over rough patches in the oral discourse (eliminating repetitions and other linguistic tics, etc.). On the rare occasions that passages were more or less inaudible, these have been indicated by ellipses between brackets. Here and there a word or a part of a sentence has been added by the editor in order to facilitate comprehension of the text or clarify elliptical formulae; since they were not spoken by Bourdieu, they have been placed between brackets.
The divisions into sections and paragraphs have been provided by the editor, as have the subtitles and punctuation.
The footnotes are mainly of three kinds. Some notes indicate the texts explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) referred to by Bourdieu, wherever it has been possible to identify them; in cases where it has seemed useful, we have added short quotations from these texts. Other notes aim to alert the reader to texts by Bourdieu, whether published before or after these lectures, that include developments of the topics discussed. Finally, there are notes that provide contextual information, for instance to explain allusions that might seem obscure to contemporary readers or those not fully aware of the French context.
Notes
1.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Science de la science et réflexivité
(Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2001);
Science of Science and Reflexivity
, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
2.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2012);
On the State
, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, Polity, 2014); Pierre Bourdieu,
Manet. Une révolution symbolique. Cours au Collège de France 1998–2000
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2013);
Manet. A Symbolic Revolution
, trans. Peter Collier and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
3.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Sociologie générale
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, vol. 1, 2015; vol. 2, 2016). In English, the following five volumes translated by Peter Collier:
Classification Struggles
(2018),
Habitus and Field
(2020),
Forms of Capital
(2021),
Principles of Vision
(2022) and
Politics and Sociology
(2023) (Cambridge: Polity).
4.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Anthropologie économique
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2017).
5.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Intérêt et désintéressement’, Cours du Collège de France à la Faculté d’anthropologie et sociologie de l’Université Lumière Lyon 2, 1 and 2 December 1988,
Cahiers de recherche du Groupe de recherche sur la socialisation
, no. 7, September 1989 [republished in 1993]; ‘Un acte désintéressé est-il possible?’, in
Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action
(Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 147–67;
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action
, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 75–91.
6.
The lectures seem to have been slightly shorter in 1988–89 than in the previous year. The recordings used here – which unfortunately include interruptions – last about an hour on average.
7.
See the editorial note in
On the State
, pp. 7–9.
Lecture of 10 March 1988
Internal reading, external reading and autonomy
Forgetting the microcosm
The coherence and normativity of the law
The space of works and the space of positions
A canonical text by d’Aguesseau
The invention of the public as a new sovereign
[The recording at our disposal lacks the start of the lecture. The length of the missing passage is difficult to estimate. To better understand the starting point of these lectures, it is helpful to refer to Julien Duval’s essay situating ‘Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State’, below.]
Durkheim said that there is one serious problem which the sociologist cannot approach without fear and trembling, which is the problem of the State.1 This problem is all the more difficult because people are constantly giving their often wrong-headed opinions on it, and I fall back on this argument: the particular difficulty of sociology, as Durkheim himself said,2 is that we are all amateur sociologists; we all think we have the answers to even the most awkward scientific questions. The problem of the State is inherently difficult, but in addition the State has never been such a subject of debate as it is today (nor the subject of so many silly opinions). This leads me to approach the problem in a negative manner,3 obliquely, moving gradually inwards towards what I believe to be its centre.
After a certain number of preliminary considerations, I shall approach the problem of the law and more precisely the problem of how a group may come to proclaim how the world should be. For indeed it is of the essence of the corps of jurists to be socially mandated – and partly self-mandated – not only to state the facts of life, but also to proclaim what these should be. We are so used to them taking this upon themselves that it appears to be self-evident, but if we stop to think for a moment, there is something scandalous, extraordinary and astounding here: how can a group, however respectable, come to feel authorized to say what should happen in the social world? How can it mandate itself, or be mandated, to decide on questions of life or death? In other words, what right do they have to say what is right and lawful, or (the question that was raised in May ‘68, among other very good questions),4 who is to judge the legitimacy of the judges?5 Are the judges best placed to decree their own legitimacy? But put in these terms, the question is inadequate. It voices the rather ironic tendency which often motivates sociology and is its primary instinct. Although this critical tendency to look behind the scenes, to be suspicious of all wearers of wigs and gowns, does allow us to take the first steps towards establishing a science of the social world, it then becomes an obstacle to attaining a rigorous knowledge of that world. This is one of the questions that I would like to raise (but there will be others).
Before I launch into the details of my analysis, I would like to say that a social space like this one [the lecture hall of the Collège de France] is not very suitable for discussions and questions and answers, as you can imagine. And so, in order to promote a form of exchange that I would find extraordinarily useful, I propose to ask you, as I have always done in the past, to place on my table, during the break for instance, a piece of paper, either signed or anonymous, with questions or objections for me to answer. If it seems possible and easy to do so I shall try to answer straight away, or otherwise in the next lecture. In any case I find it psychologically important [to proceed like this], because all speech raises the question of its own legitimacy, and one way of feeling some slight justification in monopolizing speech is to have the feeling that you are answering people’s questions. You will see that one of the texts which I intend to comment on today resorts to this form of legitimization, and even if we may doubt its scientific validity, this legitimization does have a psychological validity. So if you have any objections or questions, I encourage you very strongly to write them down on a piece of paper and place it on my table so that I can try to reply. I should point out that this procedure is important because, for reasons of time or professional discretion, I shall constantly suppose that you know things which you may possibly be ignorant of. So I insist, don’t hesitate to raise questions even if you think they may be trivial or I: I questions are often the most fundamental ones and they might oblige me to fill in details or plug gaps I have left in my argument, or, as often happens to me, to admit that I simply don’t know the answer.
Internal reading, external reading and autonomy
Now to start with, I want to recall the text that the different speakers at the seminar agreed to discuss:6 it was an article on the notion of the juridical field that I had published under the title ‘La force du droit’ (The force of the law) in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, number 64.7 The article is rather [Bourdieu hesitates in choosing his adjectives] defensive, abstract and obscure. I shall try to summarize its substance very briefly, as an introduction to the problem that I want to deal with today, while attempting to take the argument further.
In this text I try to show that the law raises an issue common to all learned discourse, or any discourse with claims to being universal, including philosophical and even scientific discourse, and, more generally, all forms of expression (such as painting and literature, for instance): to understand these particular forms of expression we need to avoid the alternatives that have shackled scientific debates up until now. For instance, in the area of philosophy, or even more in the area of literature, which have been relatively spared by objectifying analysis, two camps confront each other in a crude alternative based on the ‘either–or’ principle. The first position, whose recent form is what they call ‘semiology’, is occupied by internal analysts who claim that to understand a juridical or literary corpus, a poem, the work of a painter or a philosopher, you need to study the work and nothing but the work itself. The internal reading of the text taken in itself and for itself, considered as a coherent whole, must reveal what the text contains. The opposite, antagonistic position takes as its object of study not the text itself but the context, that is, the social space in which the text, or more simply the author of the text, is produced. This tradition has been illustrated by people like Lukács, Goldmann or Adorno on the subject of Heidegger, for example.8 To simplify, this manner of proceeding consists in seeing the texts as reflections and, in the case of law, as tools: their discourse, corpus, codes and laws are considered to be reflections of social institutions or forces (society, the dominant class, etc.) and, as such, to serve as instruments for the social groups that they express.
In the case of law, the internal readers are to be found in the camp of the doctors. This is a property that law shares with philosophy: in both cases the specialists have monopolized the history of their discipline. In practice they are the only two corps that have established the history of their discipline as a separate science. The history of philosophy is an empire within an empire, it is independent, it is not taught in history classes. It is taught by philosophers in a very special manner, that is very different from the manner of historians. This private domain is one of the means whereby a discipline works to preserve its autonomy: none shall enter here if not a philosopher, none shall enter here if not a jurist. The history of law, like the history of philosophy, is monopolized by those who have paid their entrance fee to join what I call a ‘field’ and who accept the fundamental preconditions that you accept on entering the corps of philosophers or jurists. You don’t even think about it; you find it natural for the history of law to be written by jurists or the history of philosophy by philosophers, and only philosophers, who rise up and cry scandal, denouncing reductionism or positivism, as soon as anyone who is not a declared philosopher ventures to study that special object, philosophy. This kind of postulate of autonomy is very important, and one of the objects that I shall investigate today is the constitution of an autonomous cultural universe and of a corps of people who are, almost literally, bound up with this autonomous corpus. […]
[It is often useful?] to take an expression literally: when we speak of an ‘internal reading’, ‘internal’ signifies that the text is taken in itself and for itself, that is, read by people who are on the inside of the group of those who know that the text should be read for itself and in itself. The internal reading is the reading performed by those who accept the precondition according to which a text by Descartes, for instance, has been removed from history once and for all time, and I have the right to read it without having any idea who Descartes was. I can even profess that it is important to have no idea … thus Heidegger kept repeating that you should not take an interest in the author’s world, that this world was of no importance, and he had a certain interest in saying this.
To be more precise: the internal, formalist reading is a reading that focuses on the text itself with its unique form, and only this. Internal readings are formalist readings that find their complete expression in pure theories. We should look into the possibility of a sociology of pure theories and the properties common to pure theories (Walras’s pure theory of economics, Kelsen’s pure theory of law, the pure theory of the State …). This topic would be worth developing at length.9 Suffice it to say for the moment that these pure theories share a common affirmation of the pure autonomy of form (juridical, literary, etc.) from the social world in which it is produced, whereas, opposing them, the upholders of external reading, the reductionist approach, deny this autonomy of form, and claim they have the right as it were to pass through form as a sort of screen, in order to find what is being expressed under cover of this form. To affirm the legitimacy of an internal reading also means affirming the existence of a specific mode of thinking inseparable from a specific mode of expression, a specific form, and affirming the irreducibility of any pure discourse to its translation into any other language. To exaggerate a little, to make this easier to understand, we might say that ultimately the only legitimate discourse is a faithful paraphrase: we ought perhaps to analyse the discourse of the philosophical commentary and the role played in it by linguistic and syntactic mimicry … Thus they affirm the existence of a specific mode of thinking irreducible to the social conditions of its production.
One last property: this specific mode of thinking and this specific mode of expression derive their foundation from within themselves. As Kelsen said, there is no need to seek a norm outside the juridical world:10 it is from within the law itself that the law finds its roots. This is another of the problems I need to consider: by proceeding in this way we solve the paradox of Baron Munchausen, which is I think the historicist paradox par excellence – founding a positive discourse on the social world, such as the legal discourse, without appealing to some ground outside this discourse, is to pull oneself up by one’s own hair, and stay up there hanging in the air.11 I am saying this in a rather caricatural way, but I think that the question of foundation, which is one of the noble and primordial philosophical questions, can be re-translated into this picturesque language, which is not without foundation (!). Pure theory is the ambition to suspend the system in the air by very force of the system. In the case of the law another coup de force is the passage from the positive to the normative, from the observation ‘this is how things are’ to the normative, from the sociological (or the positive and the observed) to the normative, from being to what should be.
This then is the opposition, reduced to its most simple, not to say simplistic, form. A remark in passing: the partisans of external reading display their indifference, whether voluntary or involuntary, to form, that is, to anything that might draw attention to an internal reading. The external reading tends to miss and even to ignore the specificity of different modes of expression, the specificity and irreducibility of form. For instance, one paradox of this tradition is that Marxist-structuralists like Althusser have paid no attention to the structure of the discourses that they sought to explicate using theories such as the theory of the State apparatus;12 in short, the force of traditional reflection theory, of ideology, is such that, even in a structuralist period, this approach tends to cast form and the structure of symbolic systems aside, to focus above all on function. To put it in banal and elementary terms: the sociology of religion reduces religion to its function as ‘the opium of the people’;13 it ignores the question of the very structure of the message that fulfils this function, as well as the more sophisticated question of knowing whether the structure of this message might facilitate the fulfilment of its function and whether it is not through, and only through, this structure – which might have the function of hiding the function – that the function is fulfilled (I am not being complicated on purpose; I remind you that these things are complicated).
If I insist on this simplistic opposition [between internal and external reading], it is because all you social subjects present in this room have it imprinted in your minds as an unconscious pattern; one difficulty in practising social science being that we have in our minds a whole host of oppositions of this kind which function continually and which serve as a screen filtering all the messages we receive: everything that I say will be perceived through this opposition, and while I am speaking you will continually be consciously or unconsciously changing your minds as to whether I am situating myself at one pole or the other, whereas I shall be trying to overcome this opposition, which does not mean that I shall totally succeed, because I too have had this pattern in my mind. We need to overcome this opposition, not in a syncretic manner that judges both camps to be right, as in philosophy essays (where the third part offers a kind of soft synthesis of the first two [some laughter]), but by finding a way of avoiding the alternative.
Forgetting the microcosm
This preamble was important because it helps me introduce the idea that, to understand science, philosophy and, in this particular case, law, what enables us to escape this alternative is taking into account what I call ‘the field of production’ (here, the judicial field). For the two camps that I have described do have in common their unconscious ignorance of a social reality that is extremely important for understanding the workings of a text – the space where it is produced, debated and commented upon, the space where people fight over books and paintings, etc. The internalist tradition generally mentions this space only rapidly and partially, in snippets: for instance, discussing Renouvier’s philosophy, they will mention in passing the fact that he was a student at the École normale in some particular year, when X was one of his fellow students.14 You might expect the external readers to be more attentive to this universe, but in fact they too pass over it in silence, they repress it just as much, as a psychoanalyst would put it, because, following what I call the logic of the short-circuit, they move directly from the texts to society in general or, as certain jurists would say, to the ‘social groups’ (this is the expression to use when you don’t want to say ‘social classes’), strangely consigning to silence the social universe where the special truths promulgated by learned discourse are produced.
In the case in question, this social universe is what I call ‘the juridical field’. There are various possible definitions, but I shall give you only a few, complementary ones. The juridical field is a social universe in which people struggle to say who has the right to say what is right and lawful. It is a social universe whose business is the law: the law is a business, it is an important affair; those inside this field have law as their business, as opposed to those outside the field who have nothing to do with it, who are indifferent to it. Being inside the field means being able to tell the difference between two statutes, being ready to die for the difference between two decrees, whereas somebody outside the field would not even grasp the issue. In a philosophical field, it’s the same thing: people will stake their lives on an ontological difference. Ontological difference is a very serious problem and I understand why people are ready to die for it, but what I am driving at is the fact that when you are in a field you are fashioned by it. It would take too long for me to do it today, but it is very important to tease out the implications of what it means to be the member of a field, what it means to ‘belong’. One property of membership is the fact of not being indifferent, of not saying, ‘I don’t care’, ‘it’s all the same to me’, ‘I can’t tell the difference’. Conversely, those who lack the cognitive and judgemental faculties to detect and tell the difference, are indifferent; they attribute no more value to one thing than another, they are like Buridan’s ass.15 This indifference is a sign of non-membership, whereas not being indifferent, but investing in the business of the field, is on the contrary a sign of belonging.
This means that having interests in the game is a sign of membership. My use of the word ‘interest’ is often misunderstood, which leads people to quote me saying some very silly things on the subject. So I shall speak in Latin [some laughter]. (As I always say, language is one of the great problems faced by social scientists: they are obliged to speak in a language that has been devised in order to avoid describing things as they really are. Sociology has to fight against the language that is the vehicle of discourse on the social world but at the same time masks it….) Since the word ‘interest’ immediately makes us think of Bentham or Stuart Mill, among others, I shall prefer to speak of illusio, drawing on a false etymology (I am repeating something that some of you may have heard me say before)16 that has been attributed to Huizinga. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga said that we may understand illusio as the fact of being invested in a game, of being involved in a game, of being interested in the stakes that are at issue, that are in play, in a game.17 This is precisely what I mean by a specific interest (for there is no other kind of interest – when people read me, they always forget that I point out that I am referring to a ‘specific interest’). It is because of his specific interest that the jurist is not indifferent to what is at stake in the juridical game; he has a specific competence, a specific capital, since competence may also function as capital, to tell the difference where others would not, and at the same time to invest in the game (the word ‘investment’ may be taken in its economic sense). When a field is in crisis this means that its specific capital is threatened. If for example the teaching of Latin in lycées is suppressed, its value as cultural capital collapses. This specific competence is what enables us to distinguish differences, and thereby leads us to invest, in the economic sense. The acquisition of a juridical culture is thus an investment that will bear profit over a lifetime. This economic investment is at the same time a psychological investment, but I shall not develop that point here.
That is more or less what I mean when I speak of a field. Both internal readers and external readers forget the existence of relatively independent social universes that we might qualify as ‘microcosms’ (the ‘political microcosm’ described by you-know-who18 is one of these universes). For once this is a good metaphor: a field is a microcosm that is relatively autonomous in relation to the social cosmos; it has its own logic, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The illusion of the internalists is to believe that this microcosm is entirely autonomous, as if it existed outside of space and the force of gravity. A microcosm is relatively sheltered from external pressure and demands. The law is relatively independent of the demands of the prince and the public. Inside this universe, as I have just said, specific interests and forms of capital and power develop; those possessing the rare competences that are engendered in this universe acquire an instrument of power in this universe and often beyond it. Fields, then, are the site of the production of specific forms of capital, of specific authority and rarity. They are also the site of specific power relations which are not relations of brute force between classes, as the externalists would have it, but power struggles taking the form of conflicts of competence, [even if?] ultimately there is no philosophical struggle, however abstract it may appear, that does not bear some relation to social conflict.
The coherence and normativity of the law
The jurists affirm the autonomy of their juridical norms. They speak of a juridical science […]. I shall not develop this point here, because it was developed at length in the article I drew your attention to, but one property of this rule-bound game is to produce coherence. To different degrees and in different guises according to the times and the society, the juridical field is organized in such a way that the interested (in the sense of betraying a specific interest) struggles that arise there tend to produce coherence insofar as they are placed under the sign of recognition of the systematic nature of the corpus of rules in the name of which we fight, and insofar as, to have the last word in a juridical struggle, you need to have the system, coherence and the law on your side. A juridical struggle is defined by the fact that it is a combat which you can only win if you have the law on your side; to participate in a juridical struggle is to accept the tacit rule of the game, that you leave violence at the door and you fight with the laws as your weapons. Just as in mathematical struggles you don’t act like the Roman soldier who kills the mathematician or the physicist,19 so in juridical struggles you use no force other than the force of the law. They are struggles in which you recognize the force of the law and you reinforce the law by using no force other than the force of the law. This is the paradox of the juridical field. These properties that we find affecting the system, meaning that these systems are apparently motivated by a kind of tendency to self-compression, to increasing systematization, are properties that the internalist readers, succumbing to a Hegelian vision, place inside the system20 (this remark would also be valid for mathematics, for the notion of épistémè …):21 there would be a Selbstbewegung of the system, a self-development of the system in the direction of systematization. But this problem is not inherent in the system: it occurs in the system when it is at stake in the struggles between people who recognize the system as an instrument of struggle. And it is because you have to choose to use the system if you want to struggle in the juridical field, that you work on the coherence of the system. I shall not take this first point further here.
The second point is more complicated. It deals with normativity. How is it that the juridical system produces what has always been considered, in particular by philosophers since Hume,22 something like a salto mortale? How is it that we can pass from ‘this is’ to ‘you should’ or ‘you must’. We could say that the juridical field, like all fields, is a site of social alchemy, of a sort of transmutation: on entry you have social forces and arbitrariness, and at the exit you have the universal. (I am simplifying somewhat, but if we can’t simplify for oral discussion, when can we? One virtue of oral communication is that it enables you to say rather simplistic things, then correct them or say that they are simplistic. That is why I don’t want to be recorded [laughter]: in the recording, particularly in the playback, you only notice [the simplistic things].)
This social universe in which the norm is produced has to face the question of its own foundation. Kelsen, who is one of the major founders of the pure theory of law, has followed a Kantian logic in trying to construct a pure theory of law, refusing to import any positive, positivist ideas. He sought out the fundamental norm, the basic norm, the famous point that you could use to pull yourself up by your hair.23 For my part, I would say that the fundamental norm is the law of the functioning of the field: it is in the law of the functioning of the field that we find the only possible historical foundation of the provisional originality of the law, and the same is true of philosophy and science, for instance. To try to justify what I have just declared, I would refer very briefly to Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, which I often invoke as being what I consider an important contribution to the sociology of science.24 Here Kant distinguishes what we might call temporal faculties (the faculties of theology, medicine and law) from what we might call spiritual faculties (arts, philosophy and the sciences) and he opposes these two classes of faculty according to the grounds of their authority. (I am giving you my rereading of his text from memory, but you can refer to the original yourselves.)25 The authority of the temporal faculties is based on a delegation of temporal power: the doctor, advocate, judge and theologian are mandated by a temporal power to do what they do; ultimately they are mandated as delegates or plenipotentiaries of a power. Kant’s text provides an inkling of a sociological foundation for the emergence of the question of foundation. The non-temporal faculties, on the other hand, are not mandated. Having no foundation outside themselves, they are obliged to face the question of their foundation: how to found my authority if I can’t say ‘I am mandated’, ‘I am authorized’, ‘I am guaranteed to conform’, by the State, for example, which has them in its gift? The spiritual faculties could not evade the question, and Kant’s merit, historically speaking (afterwards, things became metaphysical, with this notion of Grund [foundation] inspiring pathos), was to face up to the kind of destitution that the spiritual faculties find themselves confronted with once they know that they are no longer delegated and can no longer derive their foundation from within. In this sense Kelsen is very Kantian: he confronts the problem in the case of the law, which, of all the cases concerned, is no doubt the most difficult to find a pure foundation for. The jurist may well avoid asking himself the question faced by the mathematician or the philosopher. But Kelsen does put the question: he looks for a specific mode of argument, an absolute beginning, the equivalent of the cogito, a first fixed point giving us a starting point from which we can elaborate a chain of reasoning.26 He attempts to found a general theory of norms by making the jurist the founder of the fundamental norm from which he deduces all the particular norms. Ultimately, the central idea of what I am arguing is based on the theoretical work of Kelsen.
As often happens in the autonomous fields, Kelsen raises to the level of a conscious and explicit programme of research something that is an ongoing process in the field of production, and what I now want to show is that the juridical field established itself progressively over a period of time as a self-founded or self-founding universe, bearing its own foundation within itself, through a whole series of struggles with the Church, the princes and the royal powers, etc. What we call the autonomy of a juridical field has been the product of a collective process of representation and a collective conquest, which Kelsen retranslates into theoretical terms and tries to reproduce on the theoretical level. Retracing the whole history of the process of autonomization of the juridical field would be an enormous undertaking, and I cannot do this in a few lectures. I shall simply use two or three examples to characterize the logic of this process of autonomization, emphasizing two aspects that seem to me to be equally indispensable for a field to become autonomous and self-founding, or at least for it to be capable of giving both those who participate and those who don’t the illusion that it is self-founding. On the one hand a corps and a field become autonomous, and the corps that become autonomous as they produce the field produce precise norms which they use to break off their relation of dependency on external authorities. The jurists work to establish the juridical field as a juridical order (the word ‘order’ is important: think of the Order of Advocates, the Order of Doctors); establishing the autonomy of a discipline requires an effort of self-discipline in all the senses of the term. This work has a long history. We could give an almost yearly account of the relentless work of codification of the rules of the game in the juridical field through which that field provides itself with a collective and autonomous foundation. This is why I want merely to mention it: there are immense treatises that I have only been able to thumb through superficially. On the other hand there is a symbolic work at the level of representation which is no less important ([ignoring this] is yet another of the illusions of primary materialism) and which leads to giving the social agents engaged in the juridical field (advocates, magistrates, etc.) a mental representation of their practice.
The space of works and the space of positions
Thus I distinguish two levels. There are codes, texts and laws, and social agents who handle, benefit and profit from them. Exponents of the most pure anthropological tradition nearly always confuse culture as an objectification of mental structures – an ensemble of tools, practices, techniques and styles of thinking – with culture as the social space within which mental structures are used27 (I am saying too much or too little, but I could not avoid saying at least something). In relation to this tradition, the notion of field has the merit of saying that it involves a social level: there are judges, magistrates, barristers, advocates general, prosecutors, institutions and associations and struggles between these institutions, and these agents fight over posts, rewards, specific stakes and monopolies, etc. Within this social universe, where a whole lot of social action occurs, we see the emergence of a universe of discourse, produced, reproduced and transformed with its systemic properties (properties such as coherence, the tendency to persevere in being, to continue and perpetuate its existence), properties that it owes, I believe, to the logic of action on the social level of struggles, conflict and competition, but the two levels should be clearly distinguished. To clarify: I distinguish between the space of positions and the space of stances adopted, that is, the space of positions held by the agents in a space. If, for example, you describe the philosophical fields in France, you will note that there is a hierarchy of academic positions and then, alongside these university positions, there are journalistic positions; some philosophers hold only a university position, others hold at the same time positions in journalism, etc. We can also undertake a sociology of the space of positions and the power relations between the agents who hold these different positions, with the hypothesis that knowing this space of positions provides a basis for understanding the standpoints they have adopted, that is, what they variously write, the forms or styles they use and the quotations and references they make, whether some of these are in German or English, etc. So we need to distinguish these two universes quite clearly and not exclude the hypothesis that the universe of standpoints may be independent of the universe of positions, since it is through this independence of the standpoints from the positions that a cumulative progress towards the universal may be engendered. I would even go further: if cumulative progress there is (as there evidently is in the scientific fields, but also in a philosophical field), it is because the tacit entrance fee to a learned field is mastery of its past and present standpoints, mastery of the specific culture needed to be able to play the game; it is through mastery of this specific culture – which itself becomes an instrument and a stake in the struggles between agents who, having paid their entrance fee, are engaged in the field – that cumulative progress can be produced. Here is a simple example: a motor of ‘progress’ in a field may be the tendentiously universal posture that leads new entrants to challenge the dominant in the name of those properties of the space of standpoints that the dominant have repressed or downgraded. I can use a simpler language if I take the case of the religious Reformation. The reformists make use of the specific capital (the gospels and other canonical writings) to proceed to a return to the sources, to the pure and the foundational, and thus produce a revolutionary effect in the name of the truth of the tradition. This form of change is I think the most frequent in the fields of cultural production;28 it consists in playing on the independence of the space of standpoints from the space of positions and drawing on the thesaurus of knowledge acquired by the collective memory of the field to produce subversive effects within the field of positions.
What is important for the analysis that I offer, which differs from the theory of systems,29 is my very clear distinction between the space of the works whose corpus forms a quasi-system and aims in fact to be systematic, and the space of positions within which the strategies of the juridical agents, liable to use a reference to the system with its coherence and rigour as a weapon, are defined. […] For me, the system of juridical forms, or at least the ensemble of norms that claims to form a system, is independent of the space of positions. Incoherence is one of the weapons that can be used against a system claiming to be systematic: its claim can be turned back against it. It is through such cunning that the universal progresses. We could speak of the cunning of reason30 (because what is at stake is understanding how reason is born in history). The major cunning of reason in the social universes as I describe them is to turn back against a system the weapons that the system itself provides, to turn back against it the identity which it claims as its own. When the universe claims coherence, the chief means of attacking it is to criticize its incoherence, or to pursue the consequences of coherence to an extreme which could enable conclusions to be drawn that would not normally follow from the premises.
So we have a system. Or a quasi-system. The notion of quasi-system is relatively important. Religions, for instance, are quasi-systems; vague, fuzzy systems which achieve their impact both through their fuzziness and their systematicness: if they were completely systematic or completely incoherent, they would not function effectively. I think that this is true for the law too. In fact you could no doubt establish a hierarchy of quasi-systems, from the most fuzzy to the most precise, where I would place law in the middle. In juridical struggles, accusations of incoherence play a crucial part, and among the side effects of defending their honour (another example of the cunning of reason) when a corps of scholars is entangled in the rules of their own game, the claim of deduction arises. In the article that I have mentioned,31 I also quote two or three texts that are splendid examples of the professional ideologies of self-promotion of the corps: jurists with philosophical pretensions attempt to show what is the proper mode of juridical argumentation; they attempt to found juridical deduction as a totally rigorous form able to subsume particular cases encountered by the magistrate under universal rules. Nine times out of ten this juridical deduction is an ex post deduction (they have taken the decision first and they make the deduction afterwards), but it is an example of the cunning of reason: presenting as the result of a deduction what has been the result of an intuitive decision by the habitus is an extraordinarily important phenomenon. Ultimately everything I am saying could be summed up by the famous proverb: ‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’32 During the recent seminar, on the subject of the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court of Appeal), Alain Bancaud spoke of what the jurists themselves traditionally refer to as a ‘pious hypocrisy’.33 In fact my whole reflection turns on wondering whether pious hypocrisy, as the tribute paid to virtue by vice, might not be a contribution to the progress (still provisional and historical, of course) of juridical virtue.
To consider this point for a moment: we have a quasi-system of quasi- or semi-coherent norms, or norms claiming at least to be coherent, then a regulated universe of people playing for stakes and struggling for power in the ambit of this system, with the rules of the game forbidding them from spurning pious hypocrisy and saying: ‘All that is not worth a penny.’ The Roman soothsayers couldn’t watch each other at work without laughing,34 but (a very important rider) [only when they were] alone. This cynical view makes us laugh and helps us understand, but it also falsifies [our understanding], for in order to be effective, the Roman soothsayers had to believe in it and not even think for a moment: ‘Hang on, this whole set of rules is senseless.’ Having taken a decision according to their laws which flout coherence, regulations and laws, they need to strive wholeheartedly to clothe their decision with nominally juridical reasoning. They had in a way to appeal to the logic and coherence of the system. In so doing they did something extremely important: I think that whenever we accomplish one of these pious but hypocritical acts we make a little progress towards the universal. This is something that I had not appreciated at first. In fact it is difficult to understand, because we practise sociology at first for the Nietzschean pleasure afforded by a semi-skilled demystification; it is only with time that we accede to a third level of initiation. The semi-skilled forget that we can’t produce representations of the universal without involving ourselves in the game of the universal.
To sum up. The construction of an autonomous juridical field is the product of an extremely long collective labour, which does not see itself as an end in itself. This last point is essential if we are to avoid succumbing to the illusion that I call worst-case (‘the dominant class is becoming more and more dominant’) or best-case (‘it’s the progress of reason’) functionalism or finalism. Sociology leads us to clarify the effects of actions, but it never says that these effects have been posited as ends by the agents who have produced them. The most powerful social effects are often those that have never been consciously posited by any subject, and all the effects that I am going to describe have as their subject not individual social agents but the field. (So then you will say: ‘What is this field? It is monstrous.’ Nowadays we might say ‘It is totalitarianism.’ I leave to those who say this kind of thing the responsibility for what they are saying, that is, the utter irresponsibility of their comments.) It is (almost physically) difficult to write a rigorous social history, because linguistic habit leads us to say, ‘X did this, for that reason’, whereas we ought to invent another kind of language, along the lines of ‘this occurred, and its effects were … and he entertained intentions which …’. It was Max Weber who had the most acute intuition of this logic of the historical process. He somewhere compared history to an absent-minded little girl who intends to go somewhere but goes somewhere else, and while on the way forgets what she meant to do or decides to do something different from what she thought she had wanted to do.35 This metaphor gives an idea of what needs to be done, but in fact things are much more complicated: we have to remember that there are a lot of people who are doing a lot of things, who are doing things that they don’t realize they are doing because the space in which they are doing them, which they have helped to form and continue to form by doing what they are doing, has a logic that transcends what they are doing and thereby constantly escapes what they think they are doing. That doesn’t mean they are stupid and don’t know what they are doing: they have intentions and from time to time they have a quasi-sociological view of their universe. From time to time, some people do understand. In any case the people who dominate such complicated fields have a practical mastery of what I am describing; for instance, Heidegger could only do what he spent twenty years doing because he had a prodigious practical mastery of the philosophical field whose existence he denied until his dying day; he could have borne exemplary witness to this process.
This then is the logic of what I shall attempt to describe: in these social universes a whole lot of things occur that are regulated, without people following any regulations. They are places of regularity where there is no person as a subject; which does not mean there is no subject, for this is not structuralism: agents do do things, they constantly have aims, projects and intentions, they are not robots. But the systems of action in which they move are so complicated that the effects are irreducible to their intentions and the sum of their intentions; we need to take into account the structure of the universes within which these intentions are deployed. For this reason the least worst formula, even if it is simplistic, is still the one that I used just now: if there is a subject, it is the field.
A canonical text by d’Aguesseau
To return to the main issue (I am constantly obliged to digress, because that is the price to pay for successful communication). A relatively autonomous space that I call the ‘juridical field’ gradually establishes itself. It is a site of struggles in the name of the law and through the law, and its autonomy will be a gradual conquest: the juridical field will become a closed field, the gate and the boundaries will gradually close, and the entry fee be raised (‘Let none but geometers enter here’:36 you don’t enter if you don’t know your maths, you have to pay the entrance fee; if you try to solve a theorem with a revolver they will eject you, if they can [laughter] …). The jurist will place barriers at the entrance and display a representation which will be the entrance fee: you will not enter unless you believe that what we call the legitimate representation of the law is true.
I had planned to start by telling you very briefly how the rules concerning the profession of jurist evolved, but I think in the end that it is more interesting to start with an example of the learned elaboration of juridical discourse and the representation of juridical activity. I don’t want to disguise the fact that I am not a great specialist in the history of law, but I have been struck in my research over the last few years by the fact that the magistrates and judges often refer to a famous text written by a magistrate, the Chancellor d’Aguesseau. This text must be very special to have become a sort of canonical scripture, a sacred text for people to quote. I went to consult this text and was astonished at what I found there. I shall give you the reference because obviously I won’t be able to give you all the details. The author is the Chancellor d’Aguesseau. [Bourdieu comments on the name as he writes it on the board:] It was originally written ‘Daguesseau’ as one word, then it was written with a ‘d’’: that is part of the sociological make up of the character [laughter]. His first name, Henri François, is also important: he belonged to a family of jurists, for canonical writings were not the province of a newcomer. The text is taken from a work in twelve volumes.37 I shall not pretend to have read them all: I have read this major text, and then a few others whose titles seemed interesting to me. This text was an inaugural lecture for the opening of parliament held in 1693. Its theme was the independence of the advocate,38 the advocate being a sub-category of a larger category, the parliamentarian, the man of the gown. In fact it is a text on the autonomy of the advocate.
