When Pierre Bourdieu died of cancer in 2002, Le Monde postponed the next day’s edition to put news of his death on the front page. It’s inconceivable that The New York Times would do the same after the death of a prominent American sociologist, or really any scholar. Maybe an economist, but he would have to be pretty extraordinary. Think Alan Greenspan.
Yet Le Monde readers not only knew Bourdieu’s name; they knew his ideas. Bourdieu was such a star within the intellectual firmament of French society that his passing was of interest to all sorts of people. His work generated international acclaim, but France was always at the center of his scholarly gaze. His passing was mourned by his nation in a way reserved in America for political figures and pop stars.
On this side of the Atlantic, the philosopher-turned-sociologist was regarded as one of the most important social thinkers of the 20th century. Indeed, at the height of his career, Pierre Bourdieu was the world’s most cited living social scientist. His thinking on class differences and how they manifest themselves in everyday French life gave birth in the United States to myriad scholarly inquiries, ranging from the popularity of certain musical genres (see Bethany Bryson’s “Anything But Heavy Metal”) to the prominence of moral discourse among middle-class Americans (Michele Lamont’s Money, Morals, and Manners).
Sketch for a Self-Analysis is a slim but twisty volume. It is not an autobiography per se (a point Bourdieu explicitly makes in the book’s epigraph), yet it is the most sustained self-account of the social factors that shaped the man and his way of seeing the world. No one advocated more for a reflexive stance when approaching scholarship than did Pierre Bourdieu, so it is fitting that this work—the manuscript completed just one month before he died—would be a book-length treatment of the influences that shaped his own scholarly commitments.
For the reader seeking a full account of Bourdieu’s upbringing or his sometimes sharp disagreements with other intellectuals, Sketch leaves much undrawn. I fully expected the author to take advantage of the book’s genre as a way of responding to some of his critics, but alas, he merely offers a few tantalizing tidbits about his relationship with Claude Lévi-Strauss (“Although he always wrote me very kind and laudatory things about each of my books, [he] never felt great sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work”) and Michel Foucault (whom Bourdieu describes as always “attentive to the expectations of the Paris intellectual world”). On the whole, Bourdieu chooses a few personal experiences to highlight why certain subjects captivated his attention and how they shaped his perspective. “Nothing would make me happier,” Bourdieu closes the book, “than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences … and to draw from that realistic identification … some means of doing what they do, and living what they live, a little better.”
As the author of 45 books and more than 500 articles, Bourdieu introduced a number of concepts that have since become commonplace in social science. For example, he coined the notion of cultural capital, showing how people familiar with high-status cultural goods, such as classical music or Renaissance artwork, benefit disproportionately in schools and later in life. He also pioneered the analytic concept of the field in reference to social space that can include people and institutions. Bourdieu selected the term (champs in French) because of its evocative connotations with the military, athletics, and magnetic attraction. For Bourdieu, social life always entailed competition.
However, Bourdieu’s most famous analytical tool is that of the habitus. Reappropriating a concept that began with Aristotle and continued with Aquinas, Bourdieu wrote at length about a philosophy of human action that is grounded in social dispositions. These durable, lasting dispositions shape our view of the world. By the age of 14, the mental models are largely fixed in our minds, and they are extremely powerful—the more so because we take them for granted. Our attitudes, responses, and even our preferences are shaped by our habitus. What we think we freely choose, Bourdieu argues, is instead largely selected by social forces. We do not set our own horizons of the possible and the impossible; these come from our habitus.
Bourdieu revived the notion of habitus to explain how structures of society and individual agency interact in the personal lives of ordinary people.
Bourdieu showed that, even among those items that we assume reflect the ultimate examples of individual taste, our habitus pulls us with unseen forces of attraction. We choose food for our meals, artwork for our homes, and clothing for special occasions according to social judgment. We make choices, of course, but they are conditioned by our locations within society. Bourdieu maps these locations according to their nexus between the dominant and the dominated classes.
Brilliant ideas are often ones that seem commonsensical once they are articulated. Take, for example, Robert Merton’s concept of unintended consequences—an idea so widely accepted today that it is surprising to realize it was not articulated until 1936. On its face, habitus doesn’t seem to be anything more than acknowledging the power of socialization. Yet through clever empirical work on the tastes and preferences of French people in the 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu revived the notion of habitus to explain how structures of society and individual agency interact in the personal lives of ordinary people. For his seminal work Distinction, Bourdieu conducted what some considered to be an ethnography of the mores of an entire country. That, in itself, is an amazing feat. He also obliterated the distinction between high and popular culture by showing that they both can be ways that people distinguish themselves from others. More important, Bourdieu’s ideas advanced our thinking about the mental models that undergird our tacit understandings of how the world operates. They exist at a preconscious level in our minds. As one colleague explained it to me, habitus suggests that life is played like a jam session—no conductor, no score. We’re making it up as we go along, hitting the notes that instinctively feel right.
Scholarly acclaim for Distinction (published in 1979) and The Logic of Practice (1980) secured for Bourdieu the most prestigious of academic appointments, chair of sociology of the Collège de France. Over the following three decades, he dedicated almost all of his scholarship to the topic of people’s unequal access to the prevailing culture.
In Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu turns the reflexive stance on himself, revealing the major factors that shaped his own habitus. Bourdieu’s childhood village in Béarn, a rural region of southwestern France, is the setting that shaped him the most. Here, this son of a low-ranking civil servant first learned that his scholastic ability separated him from his playmates by a kind of “invisible barrier.” Clean, white hands were looked down upon by the families of manual workers. However, even as he became the first in his family to finish high school, Bourdieu retained a thick accent that revealed his humble beginnings.
He eventually studied philosophy with Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), where Jacques Derrida was among his classmates. At the time, philosophy was at the apogee of the highly structured intellectual pyramid of postwar France. Bourdieu enjoyed the camaraderie of this closed circle of élite academic life, but he also felt uneasy. Philosophy, he wrote, required a “social distance” with which “I could never feel at home.” After completing his degree, Bourdieu taught philosophy for a year before moving to Algeria to serve in the French military. Here, his sociological imagination came alive.
While in North Africa, Bourdieu became fascinated with the Berbers in Kabylie. At the same time, he found in the writings of anthropologists and sociologists a way of looking at the world that resonated with his desire to marry empirical accuracy to broad theoretical observations. He wanted to move outside the closed world of the philosopher’s mind and into the lived experience of people around him. Bourdieu’s first book, The Sociology of Algeria (1957), coupled close-to-the-ground ethnographic work with national statistics and macro-level analyses. After returning to France, he eventually accepted a position teaching at the Sorbonne and became Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he worked closely with Raymond Aron. Here, he dedicated his energies to unraveling the relations among power, culture, and the durable nature of social inequality. Throughout his career, Bourdieu was concerned about the role of the educational system as an institutional classifier, perpetuating social inequality at nearly every turn. This concern animated his next work, The Inheritors, which dealt with French student life and was published in 1968, and it is easily discerned throughout Sketch for a Self-Analysis.
Bourdieu writes at some length about the influence of Georges Canguilhem, his teacher and model. A philosopher of science, Canguilhem focused on how things come to be seen as “normal” in medicine and scientific enterprises. In Canguilhem, Bourdieu found an intellectual known for his academic dissonance, one whom Bourdieu approvingly described as “not wholly of this world.” Bourdieu was pleased that, even though his teacher was a great philosopher, Canguilhem never “played the philosopher … . He was hardly disposed to join in the gratuitous games of irresponsible thinking with which some people identify philosophy.” He also respected Canguilhem’s way of being an intellectual: “He never gave interviews, never spoke on radio or television.” Bourdieu did not follow Canguilhem’s fastidious avoidance of the public limelight—a point that even the self-reflexive author failed to acknowledge—but Sketch does reveal the deep affection Bourdieu felt for his master.
Sketch for a Self-Analysis is a mosaic of childhood influences on the author, institutional affiliations that made a difference, and the personal and professional relationships that left marks on this scholar. Reading Bourdieu’s self-analysis forces the reader into a similar state of reflection. I found myself remembering analogous experiences in my own life. Like Bourdieu, I discovered sociology relatively late in my academic career. When I first began my graduate studies at Princeton, the sum of my sociology experience had been an introductory course as a college freshman ten years earlier. Just as the community surrounding the ENS played an important role throughout Bourdieu’s career, the community surrounding Princeton has shaped my own trajectory with surprising influence. It was there that my sociological interests were first aroused while working for George Gallup, Jr., on a book manuscript that became Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs. Aside from the catchy title, my main contribution was to prepare brief analyses of Gallup’s data on nearly 100 aspects of religious belief in the United States. George generously named me a coauthor of the project, granting me much appreciated but as yet unearned credibility in the field of survey research.
In Sketch, Bourdieu pays tribute to Raymond Aron, the public intellectual who was an early supporter of Algerian independence. “Few people recognized me as early and as fully as he,” writes Bourdieu. I, too, greatly benefited from mentors at various moments in my life. Gary Cook, president of Dallas Baptist University, nudged me to pursue a degree at Princeton Seminary—ironic advice from one Baptist to another. That decision to leave Texas, however, shaped my future profoundly.
A few years later, George Gallup introduced me one afternoon to Bob Wuthnow, the prolific sociologist who had recently established an academic center dedicated to the study of religion at Princeton University. That, in turn, led to an invitation from Bob to join one of his graduate seminars during my final semester of seminary. I can still remember the dread I felt on the day I had to present my work to the seminar. Fearing the group would instantly recognize how little I knew about the sociology of religion, I persuaded George to come with me. What snarky graduate student would attack the new kid with George Gallup at his side? The strategy worked, and in a serendipitous turn of events, it came full circle at my dissertation defense when George, arriving late, took the only remaining seat in the room, which just happened to be right by my side.
Bourdieu championed a reflexive social science, one in which the scholar turns the sociological lens on herself. “I discovered little by little, mainly through the gaze of others,” Bourdieu writes, “the particularities of my habitus.” In disposition and temperament, I could hardly have encountered a graduate advisor more different from myself than Bob Wuthnow. He is a quiet, industrious scholar; I once had the nickname of “whirlwind.” When I delivered my practice job talk before applying for academic appointments, Bob referred to my breathless pace and over-the-top PowerPoint shtick as coming from the school of “shock and awe”—not exactly the image sought for an aspiring sociologist. Bob and several others helped me refine my presentation, and eventually, I landed at Rice University, where I have the pleasure of working daily with smart students and engaging colleagues.
Bourdieu’s Sketch shows that we can learn much about ourselves as we learn the stories of others. His entire oeuvre was committed to learning what determines the self, to understanding how we are shaped to think in certain ways. Hence, it is fitting that in this final work, Pierre Bourdieu holds up a sociological two-way mirror in which we see not only him but also our own reflection.
D. Michael Lindsay teaches sociology at Rice University and is the author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford Univ. Press).
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