Philip S. Gorski, editor. Bourdieu and Historical Analysis.

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According to Philip S. Gorski, Pierre Bourdieu has mistakenly been treated as a reproduction theorist rather than as a historical analyst concerned with explaining social change beyond the dualism of structure and event. This orientation, he argues, guided Bourdieu's empirical studies of Algerian and French peasants, literary fields, and May 1968; it was also built into his dynamic concepts. But is this volume's aim to revise our understanding of Bourdieu or to elaborate new approaches to historical analysis? David L. Swartz contributes to the former by skillfully elaborating Bourdieu's “metaprinciples”: an activist orientation, attention to material and symbolic forms of power, micro and macro levels of analysis, relational thinking, breaking with conventional understandings of objects, and self-reflexivity about the positions and dispositions that link analyst to object. Unfortunately, Swartz does not directly discuss what these principles might mean for historical analysis. In contrast, Craig Calhoun insightfully treats Bourdieu as a historical sociologist whose interest in change was itself forged through experiences of historical transformation, including Algerian colonialism, the postwar economic boom, and neoliberal anti-welfarism. He contends that Bourdieu's concepts (i.e., field, habitus, and capital) grasp the historical specificity of modern society as differentiated into distinct spheres with their own logics and values. He also identifies Bourdieu's method of historicizing a field, its corresponding habitus, and the analyst's categories in order to counteract the “tendency [of scholars] to project their own … relation to the social world into the minds of the people they observe” (p. 43). The third framing essay by Christophe Charle makes interesting points about comparative and transnational histories of European intellectual networks, but offers little new about Bourdieu or his historical analysis.