Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 18:12:26 +0100
From: Carsten Sestoft <sestoft-AT-coco.ihi.ku.dk>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu: realist, materialist...?


Dear Tobin, a comment on your post (and to some extent on Karl's concerning
his suspicion of the use of the expression "the international circulation
of ideas", with my excuses for my mixing up of his position and Eric's on
which he commented):

You wrote:

>Let's put it this way: is Bourdieu a positivist?  Certainly not, though
>clearly he sees empirical research as a crucial part of social analysis.  Is
>he a subjectivist or a social constructivist?  Aspects of those positions do
>seem to appear, but he also presents the world on the whole as independent
>of individual or collective thought, and analysis of it as requiring more
>than *verstehen* alone.  Then what philosophical tradition does he work
>within?  There are lots of possibilities, including various sorts of
>eclecticism, but he seems closest to critical realism.

I can accept this on the condition that it be clear that this position
expresses a sort of Anglo-American epistemological ethnocentrism in the
sense that you can make sense of Bourdieu's position by comparing it to
something known to you, in casu critical realism. Since this position is
not known to me, however, it conflicts with *my* epistemological
ethnocentrism (neither I nor anyone around me have ever heard about Bhaskar
or critical realism, except on this list). But on the other hand I and my
colleagues in Denmark have a direct (if small...) knowledge of the
epistemological traditions to which Bourdieu himself refers, i.e. Kant,
Neokantians like Cassirer, sociologists like Durkheim and Weber who in some
ways may be considered as inspired by the turn of the century
Neokantianism, and the (as far as I know from Johan Heilbron's The Rise of
Social Theory) Neokantian interpretation of Comtean positivism to which the
French tradition of "historical epistemology" (Bachelard, Canguilhem) is an
heir. Bourdieu (and Foucault), then, may be said to be firmly founded in a
Neokantian tradition (and, of course, a lot of other traditions, among them
the Marxist), which remains little known in English-speaking countries.
This is to say that for someone who knows this tradition (if only a little,
I am no philosopher), to compare Bourdieu's position with that of critical
realism is no explanation or guide to understanding but rather the
contrary, a blurring of references and an obliteration of quite real
historical connections. And this is, I want to maintain, very much a
problem about the international circulation of ideas: if a comparison
between Bourdieu and CR may be illuminating for those raised in an
Anglo-American tradition, it is misleading for other Europeans (and
probably downright incomprehensible to the French).

best wishes
Carsten Sestoft
University of Copenhagen



**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu