From: "Gabriel Ash" <Gabriel.Ash.1-AT-ND.EDU>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 96 22:53:28 
Subject: Re: Alexander and "Fin de Siecle"


On Thu, 15 Aug 1996 15:43:52 BST, David Butterworth wrote:

>r.e. Jeff Alexander's "Fin de Siecle."
>
>It's good to see this raised, for purely 
>self-interested reasons, as I have been thinking 
>of mailing a question to the group based around 
>one part of Alexander's critique.

As I haven't read the book, I can only react to the summary 
you gave, which I think raises, together with the post from 
David Butterworth, some interesting questions.

First I would like to recall a very thoughtful critique of 
the American reception of Bourdieu:
Hage, Ghassan. Review of 'An Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology', by Pierre
Bourdieu and L. Waquant. In Theory and Society 23, no. 3 (June 1994): 419-40.

Hage argues, and I rewrite the argument here rather freely,  that the conditions 
of academic sociology in North-America (the way projects are funded)  determine
a misrecognition of Bourdieu's work in that attention to his work is only on 
a theoretical level. The 'open concept' is not meant to breed confusion, but to 
enable constant reworking of concepts in view of empirical studies and according 
to their needs. 
A purely theoretical sorting out of ideas and concepts, not in connection to a 
set of empirical questions, may be useful and philosophically 
interesting, but it must be done 'against the grain' of Bourdieu's methodology.

>
>Whilst Bourdieu's work, on my reading, is 
>*broadly* determinist, there still appears to be 
>plenty of scope for the notion of agency within 
>it, although perhaps this is an area where 
>Bourdieu needs to elaborate his views further. 
>

As far as I understand him, see the begining of 'Le Sens Pratique',
Bourdieu denies that one has to choose between determinism and 
agency. It would seem that the repetitious dead-end half a millenium 
squabble over determinism vs. free will should make many appreciate an 
attempt to avoid this dichotomy, why force him back to make a choice?
What's more, social determinism is the application to humans of 
a model of nature which is considered today to be unapplicable even to 
dead physical nature itself.  

What do you / Alexander mean by determinism?

-------------
Gabriel Ash
Notre-Dame
-------------


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