Sociological Imagination - May 15, 2014
The thing I like most about Bourdieu is his conception of public sociology. It seems clear to me that Bourdieu was a public sociologist, though others are less certain about this and I suspect it’s not a term he would have chosen to use himself. The book of talks I’m basing this post on is here and all the references are from this book.
The Challenge of ‘Globalisation’
The politics of these talks are rooted in the
anti-globalisation movement of the late 90s and early 00s. As such,
Bourdieu’s attentiveness to the political rhetoric of ‘globalisation’ is
not a surprise. He draws attention to the double meaning of
‘globalisation’: the descriptive sense of a unification of the economic field and the normative sense
of the desirability that these changes are supported through economic
policy. The slight of hand arises because the former is often used to
disguise the latter i.e. economic ‘reality’ is invoked to justify the
pursuit of policies which are themselves responsible for the putative
‘reality’. The global market is a political creation, much as national
markets had been, arising from “policy implemented by a set of agents
and institutions, and the result of the application of rules
deliberately created for specific ends, namely trade liberalisation
(that is, the elimination of all national regulations restricting
companies and their investments)” (pg 84). Bourdieu argues that
‘globalisation’ is a ‘pseudo-concept’, at once descriptive and
prescriptive, which has replaced ‘modernization’ as the intellectualised
trappings for the ideology of late capitalism.
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