The classical sociological theorists all provided penetrating, though selective, insights into the nature of the state. Nevertheless, even today, its contours remain highly disputed. In this fundamentally important book composed of a series of lectures at the Collège de France between January 1990 and December 1991, Bourdieu attempts to provide his own distinctive definition. Although he accepts none of the classical definitions developed by Marx, Weber or Durkheim, he nevertheless draws upon the work of all three in elaborating his own concept of the state: from Marx he draws upon his analysis of primitive accumulation; from Weber his concept of legitimation and the development of rationalization; and from Durkheim the social division of labour and the social nature of the categories.
The state, Bourdieu argues, is the sector of the field of power, or bureaucratic field, that is defined by a possession of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence. Though Weber is clearly present in this definition, it is from Durkheim, Cassirer and, to a lesser extent, structuralism that his theory draws its originality, specifically through a cluster of concepts relating to symbolic forms—symbolic power, violence, and capital. Symbolic power and symbolic violence are largely exercised in an invisible manner, with those beholden to them remaining unaware of their very existence; in relation to symbolic violence, they are complicit in their own domination. Symbolic capital is the form of capital that arises from the relationship between any particular kind of capital and those “agents socialized in such a way as to be familiar with and acknowledge this capital”. The monopolization of symbolic violence is a condition for the exercise of a monopoly of physical violence, and his definition of the state therefore underlies that of Weber. This does not mean relapsing into an idealism. Rather it entails an “expanded materialism”, where symbolic and material forms of domination co-exist. Drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between logical and moral conformity, Bourdieu argues that symbolic power creates belief and obedience in the dominated constituting the hidden principle of orthodoxy that becomes manifested in social and public order. The state is an institution that has the power to produce a socially ordered world without necessarily giving orders or exerting a physical force. It does so by inculcating similar cognitive structures in all agents within its jurisdiction, principally by way of the school system. The question of the state then constitutes the most difficult question facing the sociologist. How do we avoid thinking the state with state thinking? The latter penetrates the minutest aspects of our lives from filling in a bureaucratic form, carrying an identity card or signing a birth certificate, to following rituals and festive holidays marked on state instituted calendars: it is the public at the heart of the private. As a result, the state is collectively misrecognised. It is a collective fiction that is perceived as real by individuals and thereby becomes real through a belief in its reality. In other words it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The notion of a reified state is a legal fiction consisting of words and modes of organization instituted by political theorists in the 16th and 17th centuries who, through the performative power of their discourse, produced the very object they were writing about. It is not something you can lay your hands on but a reality that exists in its effects and the collective beliefs that underpin those effects. The state should instead be conceived as an administrative or bureaucratic field, part of the field of power, a space structured according to oppositions linked to specific forms of capital tied to different interests. As Bourdieu notes: “A certain number of agents who have made the state and made themselves into state agents by making the state, have had to make the state in order to make themselves into holders of a state power”. It differs, however, from other social fields: after having accumulated different types of capital (initially symbolic, but later military, and economic), it generates a meta capital (the power of exercising power over capital). The state he notes, “is meta”, that is “a power above powers”. It is a field in which social agents struggle to possess a capital which gives power over the other social fields and forms of capital.
The process of concentration of capital, and the creation of a unified social space, is simultaneously accompanied by a process of unification of culture—as legitimate national culture. Yet, this concentration is inseparable from a process of universalization and dispossession: as the state monopolizes various markets, including the linguistic market, it concurrently downgrades and disqualifies local accents, customs, and local rights. Regional diversity gives way to nationalist concentration and unity. In addition, “the conditions of construction and accumulation of the universal are inseparable from the conditions of constitution of a caste, a state nobility that monopolizes the universal”.
In order to escape from the illusion of its theological reality, Bourdieu suggests that we examine the mechanisms that produce state effects by substituting for the idea of the state, “acts of state”. Using the setting up of the Barre Housing Commission in France as an illustration, he outlines the magical alchemy through which individuals are transformed by the power of state delegation, as mandatories, to become state officials empowered to speak on behalf of the public and universal, utilizing a specific rhetoric and theatricalization. By speaking in the name of the public good, of the social whole, as did legal prophets for Weber, these officials simultaneously appropriate for themselves a particular resource that is seen as a universal resource.
An analysis of what the state does serves as a necessary preliminary to an historical analysis of its sociogenesis. In addition to examining “state acts”, a genetic approach institutes a rupture with accepted ideas and allows for the “arbitrariness of beginnings“ to reemerge. Bourdieu then outlines a model based on four stages of state formation. The first concerns the process of concentration of each type of capital (symbolic, military, informational and economic), which are all seen as interdependent, though symbolic capital constitutes a condition for the others. The second phase entails the dynastic patrimonial state and its reproduction strategies centred on succession and hereditary lineage. The third phase delineates a shift “from the king’s house to reason of state“. This focuses on the conflict between two opposing groups: first, the bearers of the old social model of reproduction centred on lineage, blood, and hereditary, where the king rules in a manner that is an extension of the household; and second, a new model, partly the result of the development of an autonomous legal field, and based on the acquired competencies of individuals (principally lawyers and bureaucrats) who have gained powers independently of the king and in which the school plays a defining role. Here the two models operate alongside each other, with the latter gradually displacing the former so that personal rule increasingly gives way to formal rule. In the fourth stage a brief mention is made of a shift from a bureaucratic state to a welfare state.
For Bourdieu, the process of autonomization and separation of power from the person of the king is not linear or progressive, as for example in Weber’s notion of rationalization, but rather uneven and slow with the possibility of regressions to the logic of the house occurring. The French Revolution is also falsely conceived as a bourgeois revolution: if there was a break with the past it was in terms of the impersonal bureaucratic field breaking away from personalized house rule.
It is difficult to do justice to the number of profound insights provided by this book within the restricted space of a book review. The discussion of cognitive order analytically preceding social order and the self-referring nature of the state is important. Bourdieu himself acknowledges there are many other instances of social phenomena that take on this self-referring characteristic. Others (in philosophy, John Searle, and in sociology, Barry Barnes) have argued that such processes are essentially constitutive of the social world. The oral nature of the presentations means that Bourdieu often goes into interesting asides. And, since they were aimed at a broad audience, the language of the lectures is relatively accessible, though many of the ideas remain difficult. The breadth and depth of Bourdieu’s reading is also extraordinary. And the editors have done a remarkable job of compiling the gamut of references and allusions he makes during the course of the lectures. Given the primary position the field of power and state has in his work, as what he calls a “meta meta“, setting and determining the relative weight of the other forms of capital, the book provides the beginnings for a fuller and more rounded understanding of Bourdieu’s work, not least in its stress on the fundamental role of symbolic capital as opposed simply to cultural capital. Conversely, however, the lecture format means that the analysis of the state is not as systematic or as well ordered as it could be. This partly follows from the recursive nature of Bourdieu’s style, but also from the presentation of newly thought ideas. Moreover, the concepts of symbolic violence and capital—the latter as both condition for and effect of other capitals—appear throughout the book, but the short-hand definitions he provides are not rigorous or systematic enough to carry this weight, at least not in these lectures.
Bourdieu is also highly critical of Marxist approaches, sometimes rightly, and wants to move away from what he considers an economically reductionist and functionalist view of the state: from Marx to Althusser via Gramsci. But interestingly there is no discussion of class relations within the book, despite favourably discussing the work of Tilly, Corrigan and Sayer and Elias, all of whom discuss the relevance of class in their account of state formation. Bourdieu of course is not obliged to do so, but it is of note that even the noblesse de robe are discussed in terms of their universalizing role rather than their class condition, as for example in Goldmann’s The Hidden God. There is also little discussion of the historical variation in infrastructural power of the state. For example, how widely accepted and penetrating was the state’s symbolic power in relation to the population governed by dynastic states, by comparison with modern nation states? Weber had defined society through the secular power of the state’s monopoly, and the spiritual domination and monopoly of the church, but there is very little discussion of religion in terms of symbolic domination. In addition, what powers and forms of thinking exist outside of the state doxa, given the imposition of the state symbolic order both objectively in things and subjectively in mental structures? Bourdieu himself would probably see this as an empirical question to be investigated by the models he provides and he does talk of a division between the left hand and right hand of the state. He dismisses Gramsci, without qualification, but the latter does at least look at the development of counter-hegemonic strategies within organized forms of consent. Here Bourdieu’s thinking has parallels with Foucault, who surprisingly does not feature in the book. His reading of Elias, though generally favourable, describes his approach as a “physicalist theory“ with a tautological account of a “monopoly mechanism“. Elias’s analysis is not without fault, but he does talk about a monopolisation of the means of orientation, in addition to taxation and violence, and provides an empirical description underpinning the monopoly mechanism. This is done in terms of processual concepts that take account of various social balances, in comparison to the hard-edged binaries Bourdieu sometimes uses.
These criticisms and reflections should not overshadow the fact that this is a major book for the social sciences. Unlike the majority of books on the state, it actually provides a basis for future empirical work on how states operate. Of the three kinds of books that have relevance for the academic reader—books to skim, books to read, and books to study—it is emphatically a book to study. One that is bold, profound and enlightening.
