Abstract
A book published in 2012 included the publication of the lecture course on the State delivered by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France. The course was given at a time when Bourdieu’s work had reached full maturity, and it completed, at the most generic level of significance —in the “geometral of all perspectives”— the analytical potential opened up by the main categories he used to approach the social world: habitus, field and, above all, capital or symbolic power, the true core of uncontested legitimacy and of the omnipresent domination that the state has acquired in the contemporary world.
Highlights
Given the theme of the book, the pedagogic role of the transcribed lecture, and its two temporalities, a set of circumstances are brought together within it that directly interpellate some of the key concepts in the intellectual enterprise and currency of the French sociologist (Lenoir, 2012)
When discussing “symbolic power”, he candidly confessed to his students at the Collège, “I did not know that I was speaking of the state” (Bourdieu, 2012: 288)
The State is what enables each of the fields of the social world, and the mechanisms of power established within the institutions, in the justifying and performative discourses of authority, to be connected and understand each other
Summary
During 1990 and 1991 the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) devoted his lecture course in the Collège de France to the analysis of the State. These questions are developed in the direct language of oral communication, far removed from the (difficult) formalisation of written discourse which, as frankly acknowledged by the author, causes difficulties for non-specialists and constituted a permanent concern in his communication with readers (and was frequently the object of criticism) This methodical exercise of pedagogy was carried out from the chair of the Collège de France, included among the major academic institutions, with a very marked vocation of academic innovation: a refuge for the “consecrated heretics” (Bourdieu, 1984: 140-148). Only a minor part of this extensive reflection in the lecture course was systematically developed by Bourdieu subsequently and was formulated in written form in the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales and in later compilations of his writings
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