Bourdieu and “grand theory”

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu's writing seems entirely orthogonal to grand theory. Bourdieu rejected Parsonian grand theory and the alternatives presented by Lazarsfeld and Merton and rejected “theoretical theory.” I argue that Bourdieu's years of philosophical education created a relatively stable baseline epistemology that positioned him against grand theory. At two moments, however, grand theory emerged in his discourse: in the 1970s and between 1995 and 2001. Bourdieu moved closer to grand theory in the 1970s due to changes in the French intellectual field and Bourdieu’s trajectory through that field. After his election to the Collège de France (1981), Bourdieu felt less need to compete on this terrain. During this period, he wrote his three empirical chefs d’oeuvre—Homo Academicus, The State Nobility, and The Rules of Art, all of which are centered on social change, historical discontinuity, and overdetermined causalities. The return of a more generalizing language from the mid-1990s onward was related to the macrosocietal changes Bourdieu described as neoliberalism. This undertheorized concept—neoliberalism—realigned Bourdieu's thinking with a kind of grand theory or metanarrative. At the same time, however, he continued to publish works that rejected grand theory, such as Pascalian Meditations and Science of Science and Reflexivity.