Is Bourdieu just a Hobbesian in sociological disguise? Probably.
One of the key moments in political and social theory occurs in Leviathan when Thomas Hobbes described people as obsessed with power and glory. If you believe Hobbes’ theory of humanity, then his call for a strong sovereign makes sense. People who are extreme egoists need a higher authority to keep them in line. Otherwise, life will be “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Philosophers call Hobbes’ moral theory “psychological egoism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states: “Psychological egoism, the most famous descriptive position, claims that each person has but one ultimate aim: her own welfare” and “Preference or desire accounts identify self-interest with the satisfaction of one’s desires. Often, and most plausibly, these desires are restricted to self-regarding desires.” The Encyclopedia lists numerous books that explain Hobbes’ version in detail and why it’s an integral part of his political theory.
Sociologists are notorious anti-egoists. Routinely, they say that you can’t understand the real world if you stick with just self-interest. People are routinely socialized in ways that encourage them to have other-directed attitudes and preferences. Yet, despite this claim, psychological egoism has a prominent role in once of sociology’s central theories: Bourdieusian habitus and field theory.
The key argument of Bourdieusianism is that we live in “fields,” which are meso-level social domains that have their own status hierarchies and rules for gaining status and honor. The social psychology of Bourdieu is that people in a field acquire a “habitus,” a set of “moods and dispositions” that orient them toward the forms of status competition within the field. Schools, for example, are routinely discussed in terms of this theory. Teachers, for example, learn the “rules of the game” within a school and act in ways to gain social position.
Is Bourdieusianism rely on some version of psychological egoism? I think so. Here’s a few clips from The Logic of Practice. In his discussion of habitus, Bourdieu makes it clear that habitus is oriented towards “practical functions” (52) and that “the practical world that is constituted in relation the relationship with the habitus, acting a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of realized ends.” (53) In other words, dispositions are accumulated through history and they tend to be focused on the goals that exist in the ego’s perceived social structure.
By itself, this isn’t a particularly strong case until you consult his writings on how people use social and cultural capital in fields and how people are oriented towards interests and status. Here’s a few sentences from An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. The book is a lengthy discussion and interview between Loic Wacquant and Pierre Bourdieu, who are labeled as “LW” and “PB:”
LW: This implies that there are as many interests as fields, that each field simultaneously presupposes and generates a specific form of interest commensurate with those that have currency elsewhere.
PB: Precisely. Each field calls forth an and gives life to a specific form of interest… Furthermore, this specific interest implied by one’s position in the game differentiates itself according to the position occupied in the game. (117)
And
LW: What sets your theoretical approach apart from an “economic approach to human behavior” a la Gary Becker (1976)?
PB: … A general science of the economy of practices that does not artificially limit itself to those practices that are socially recognized as economic must endeavor to grasp capital , that “energy of social physics” in all its forms, and to uncover the laws that regulate their conversion from one into another…
PB: … Orthodox economics overlooks the fact that practices may have principles other than mechanical causes or conscious intention to maximize one’s utility and yet obey an immanent economic logic. ` (118-119)
In other words, the ego lives in a social world that shapes preferences though a historical process and what people try to accomplish in these fields is not economic in the traditional sense, but people still try to do things in a strategic and competitive way, even if that does not rest on a logic of explicit utility maximization.
Fair enough, yet, the position is actually quite close to Hobbes. People may not exist in a brutish free-for-all, but they still seek status and glory and power in historically specific ways that are manifest in their social environment. This is why Bourdieu wrote a great deal about domination, power, and symbolic struggle.
I’ll conclude with one key distinction between Hobbesian and Bourdieusian theories. For Hobbes, extreme egoism leads to collection action problems (e.g., lack of security and interpersonal violence) that states solve. In contrast, Bourdieu just was not able to see a path out of the non-stop status competition and domination described in his theories and empirical work. Things just evolve into different systems of domination over time, but struggles and domination continue.
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