Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics

Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics PDF Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745634885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu's distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation - starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the "mystery of ministry." The fruitfulness of Bourdieu's approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu's own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society. Charting the connections between Bourdieu's political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.

Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics

Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics PDF Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745634885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu's distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation - starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the "mystery of ministry." The fruitfulness of Bourdieu's approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu's own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society. Charting the connections between Bourdieu's political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.

Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals

Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals PDF Author: David L. Swartz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226925021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

The Logic of Practice

The Logic of Practice PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804720113
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Our usual representations of the opposition between the "civilized" and the "primitive" derive from willfully ignoring the relationship of distance our social science sets up between the observer and the observed. In fact, the author argues, the relationship between the anthropologist and his object of study is a particular instance of the relationship between knowing and doing, interpreting and using, symbolic mastery and practical mastery—or between logical logic, armed with all the accumulated instruments of objectification, and the universally pre-logical logic of practice. In this, his fullest statement of a theory of practice, Bourdieu both sets out what might be involved in incorporating one's own standpoint into an investigation and develops his understanding of the powers inherent in the second member of many oppositional pairs—that is, he explicates how the practical concerns of daily life condition the transmission and functioning of social or cultural forms. The first part of the book, "Critique of Theoretical Reason," covers more general questions, such as the objectivization of the generic relationship between social scientific observers and their objects of study, the need to overcome the gulf between subjectivism and objectivism, the interplay between structure and practice (a phenomenon Bourdieu describes via his concept of the habitus), the place of the body, the manipulation of time, varieties of symbolic capital, and modes of domination. The second part of the book, "Practical Logics," develops detailed case studies based on Bourdieu's ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria. These examples touch on kinship patterns, the social construction of domestic space, social categories of perception and classification, and ritualized actions and exchanges. This book develops in full detail the theoretical positions sketched in Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice. It will be especially useful to readers seeking to grasp the subtle concepts central to Bourdieu's theory, to theorists interested in his points of departure from structuralism (especially fom Lévi-Strauss), and to critics eager to understand what role his theory gives to human agency. It also reveals Bourdieu to be an anthropological theorist of considerable originality and power.

On Television (Large Print 16pt)

On Television (Large Print 16pt) PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459604172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
On Television exposes the invisible mechanisms of manipulation and censorship that determine what appears on the small screen. Bourdieu shows how the ratings game has transformed journalism - and hence politics - and even such seemingly removed fields as law' science' art' and philosophy. Bourdieu had long been concerned with the role of television in cultural and political life when he bypassed the political and commercial control of the television networks and addressed his country's viewers from the television station of the College de France. On Television' which expands on that lecture' not only describes the limiting and distorting effect of television on journalism and the world of ideas' but offers the blueprint for a counterattack.

What Is a People?

What Is a People? PDF Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541716
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

On the State

On the State PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509533915
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
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 Ð 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.

The Misguided Search for the Political

The Misguided Search for the Political PDF Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745681158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ‘real’ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ‘socially weightless’ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question. Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control. Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal about the social conditions necessary for effective political agency.

Party and Society

Party and Society PDF Author: Cedric de Leon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745659845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Political parties are central to democratic life, yet there is no standard definition to describe them or the role they occupy. "Voter-centered" theoretical approaches suggest that parties are the mere recipients of voter interests and loyalties. "Party-centered" approaches, by contrast, envision parties that polarize, democratize, or dominate society. In addition to offering isolated and competing notions of democratic politics, such approaches are also silent on the role of the state and are unable to account for organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the African National Congress, which exhibit characteristics of parties, states, and social movements simultaneously. In this timely book, Cedric de Leon examines the ways in which social scientists and other observers have imagined the relationship between parties and society. He introduces and critiques the full range of approaches, using enlivening comparative examples from across the globe. Cutting through a vast body of research, de Leon offers a succinct and lively analysis that outlines the key thinking in the field, placing it in historical and contemporary context. The resulting book will appeal to students of sociology, political science, social psychology, and related fields.

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology PDF Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226067414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Preface by Pierre Bourdieu Preface by Loic J.D. Wacquant I Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Beyond the Antinomy of Social Physics and Social Phenomenology 2 Classification Struggles and the Dialectic of Social and Mental Structures 3 Methodological Relationalism 4 The Fuzzy Logic of Practical Sense 5 Against Theoreticism and Methodologism: Total Social Science 6 Epistemic Reflexivity 7 Reason, Ethics, and Politics II The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Sociology as Socioanalysis 2 The Unique and the Invariant 3 The Logic of Fields 4 Interest, Habitus, Rationality 5 Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence 6 For a, Realpolitik of Reason 7 The Personal is Social III The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu 1 Handing Down a Trade 2 Thinking Relationally 3 A Radical Doubt 4 Double Bind and Conversion 5 Participant Objectivation Appendixes, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 How to Read Bourdieu 2 A Selection of Articles from, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3 Selected Recent Writings on Pierre Bourdieu.

Reinventing Political Culture

Reinventing Political Culture PDF Author: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745646379
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The way people think and act politically is not set in stone. People can and do change the fundamental cultural contours of their political situation. Their political culture does not only restrict imagination and action - it is also a resource for political creativity and invention. In Reinventing Political Culture, this resource is uncovered and explored. Analyzed as a tension between the power of culture and the culture of power, the concept of political culture is reinvented and applied to understanding the practice of people transforming their own political culture in very different circumstances. Three instances of such reinvention are closely examined: one historic, during the twilight of the Soviet empire; one actively in process and actively opposed, ‘the Obama revolution'; and one an apparent distant dream, the power of culture and the culture of power that would avoid ‘the clash of civilizations' in the Middle East. In accessible and engaging prose, Goldfarb clearly and forcefully presents students and scholars of sociology, comparative politics, and cultural studies with an original position on political culture, showing how the political cultures of our times pose not only grave dangers, but also opportunities for creative alternatives.