The Poverty of Philosophy

Chapter abstract Marx and Bourdieu embark from similar criticisms of philosophers as suffering from the illusion that ideas make history—what Marx calls ideology and Bourdieu calls scholastic reason. Accordingly, both turn from the logic of theory to the logic of practice. However, where Marx sees the relations of production as leading to class struggle and revolution, Bourdieu sees bodily practice as instilling symbolic domination through habitus. This leads Marx and Bourdieu to adopt divergent views of history, divergent approaches to social change, divergent roots of symbolic domination, and divergent perspectives on contentious politics. If the followers of Marx seek to explain the quiescence of the working class by developing theories of cultural hegemony, will the followers of Bourdieu build a research program that focuses on the internal contradictions and external anomalies of Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic domination?

Cultural capital · Epistemology · Habitus · Hegemony · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Symbolic power · Law · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics