File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-01-02.102, message 188


Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 13:09:29 -0600 (CST)
From: KERRY <MACDONAK-AT-Meena.CC.URegina.CA>
Subject: Re: concept-realism & -fetishism & Wittgenstein


Beatrice Reusch" <mail07464-AT-pop.net> responed to:
::At 9:50 AM 12/12/95, Jo Helle-Valle wrote:
::>What this tells us is that there is a fundamental gap between that which we
::>are trying to grasp and the concepts we use to try to grasp 'it' with. Our
::>language does not picture reality, we invent concepts in order to understand
::>our (and other's) practices. ... These are inventions made by Bourdieu
::>and they are not true or untrue, but more or less useful as tools to grasp
::>the reality we all agree is out there. (That is if our task is not
::>'exegetic' excavations of Bourdieu's mind.)
::
::Isn't this, more or less, what Max Weber called "ideal types"?


No, if anything Bourdieu's method is the complete opposite of Weber's.  Weber
believed that one could avoid value-judgements if one created a model to
compare to reality - his ideal types.  Unfortunately, as Max Horkheimer points
out in MAX WEBER AND SOCIOLOGY TODAY (Stammer, Otto (ed), New York: Harper &
Row, 1971) Weber's method  completely embeds values within it in an uncritical
fashion (an approach which Bourdieu completely rejects in his THE CRAFT OF
SOCIOLOGY).

In fairly simplified language (for brevity and not a comment on ANY reader),
Weber's ideal type essentially takes the myth about an institution, codifies it
and then compares the real institution to the myth (this is HIGHLY simplified). 
Bourdieu constantly rails against this type of sociology.  He looks at his
concepts as 'thinking tools' which allow one to approach  the empirical reality
and to discover what are the real dynamics and to uncover the 'myth' or
unreflexive aspects of that field.



   

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