‘Un étrange retournement'? Pierre Bourdieu and the French republican tradition

Abstract

Over recent years, the French sociologist and ethnologist Pierre Bourdieu has become involved in a series of increasingly high‐profile political interventions all of which have been couched in a rhetoric of the most classically French republican kind. Many commentators have reacted with shock to Bourdieu's adoption of this kind of rhetoric, seeing it as wholly contradictory when set against his assaults on the ‘myths’ of French republicanism in his earlier works on culture and education. This article argues that such shocked reactions are unjustified and rest on the faulty assumption that Bourdieu's early works on culture and education were written within an exclusively Marxist or marxisant tradition. Closer analysis reveals a series of striking similarities with the analyses of French education offered by Emile Durkheim and Gustave Lanson at the turn of the century and suggests Bourdieu's work has always owed at least as much to the republican traditions of ‘la nouvelle Sorbonne’ as to Marxism.