Abstract
Were I to host my ideal dinner party, Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx would be on the guest list. So too would A.A. Gill, the food and cultural critic who wrote for The Times, but who, alas, died in 2016, a mere 62 years old. It is well known that Marx’s ‘favourite’ maxim was ‘Nil humani mihi alienum’. Gill’s might well have been ‘everything human is alien to me’. Much like Bourdieu and Marx, when it came to being critical there was very little that was off the table for A. A. Gill – metaphorically or otherwise.
Given how eye-wateringly critical each could be, the seating arrangement at said dinner party would have to be carefully managed. Indeed, it might be best if Bourdieu, Marx, and Gill were seated in a way that meant that each could scarcely hear what the other was saying, lest the conversation descend into a devastating critique of all and everything. This could be achieved by placing various far less combative guests between them. John Stuart Mill, on account of his legendarily placid temperament, could go to the right of Marx; to the left of Marx, I would seat ancient British warrior queen, Boudica, a woman not remotely fazed by belligerent men who find it hard to back down; and between Bourdieu and Gill, I would be inclined to seat Dostoevsky’s Idiot, a Christ-like figure seemingly immune to provocation.
The matter of how profoundly and unrelentingly critical thinkers can be brought into close proximity in such a way that does not result in their mutual destruction but instead facilitates a generative and positively enlightening experience for all, is a key one for the book I am reviewing here. I will say right now that the book manages this task very well. It is a book that will appeal to scholars of Bourdieu and Marx, as well as scholars whose work takes inspiration from critical and practice theory more broadly.
The book comprises a preface written by Mike Savage; an introduction written by the book’s editor, Gabriella Paolucci; and 14 chapters proper, which are divided out into three main ‘parts’. Part I – Domination: Practising Critique, comprises six chapters; Part II – Inheriting Critique of Economic Practices and Theories, comprises five chapters; Part III – Intellectual Field: Interpreting Critique of Ideology, comprises three chapters. The book has no conclusion, a point to which I will return.
More broadly, the book forms part of a series entitled ‘Marx, Engels, and Marxisms’. The series, as stated on the reverse side of the opening page of the book, is a response to the ‘Marx renaissance . . . underway on a global scale’. Marx is on the up again, it would seem, precisely at a time when in certain quarters critical theory is alleged to have ‘run out of steam’ (Felski, 2015; Latour, 2004). In other quarters still, among the proponents of Yale School cultural sociology, Marx and Bourdieu have been subject to significant critical reproach, as opposed to rapprochement, in particular the tendency of both to treat the symbolic dimensions of collective existence as reducible to, rather than autonomous from, ‘harder’ social structural and economic factors (Alexander, 2003; Alexander and Smith, 2018). Thus, in recent decades we have seen in the case of Latour and his associates on the one hand, and Jeffrey Alexander and his associates on the other, attempts to oust Marx and Bourdieu from their dominant positions within the cannons of classical and modern social theory respectively.
As it relates to the wider Bourdieu industry, and it is an industry, the book is a noteworthy addition to its outputs. In recent, and not so recent years, new books by Bourdieu, new books about Bourdieu, and books which claim to re-read Bourdieu anew, have kept on coming. Some of these books have been poor. This is not one of those books. In that it seeks to re-read Bourdieu anew, in this case in relation to Marx and wider formations of Marxist thought, it is a strong and original contribution to the literature. As the order of the wording of the title suggests, the emphasis is on Bourdieu more than it is Marx, albeit that the significance of the latter for the former is a central point of reference in each of the chapters.
A pertinent point to raise at this stage concerns the book’s ‘accessibility’. How well does the reader need to know the work of Bourdieu and Marx, and the vast bodies of literature to have grown up in their wake, to be able to access the book? I shall reflect more on this towards the end of the review, but for now let us say that while the book may well exceed the decoding capacities of some, many of the chapters – chapters 3 and 5 to list but two - comprise excellent points of departure for getting to grips with various key concepts of Marx and Bourdieu, and the wider intellectual traditions from which they draw and have fed back into in ongoing and transformative ways.
The book is clear about and states clearly the aims it sets itself. It questions ‘the modes and outcomes of the strategies of appropriation that Bourdieu practiced with regard to Marx’ (2). Just as important is what the book intends not to do. It does not take part in the game of sanctioning orthodoxic or heterodoxic readings of Bourdieu or Marx. Neither does it ‘intend to indulge in the vulgate of a Bourdieu without Marx, against Marx or with Marx’ (5). Rather, and as Paolucci notes in the introductory chapter, intellectual ‘inheritance is realised only when there is someone who appropriates it’ in a way intended not to fetishise the legacy but instead ‘break it down and select from it, the better then to reconstruct it’ (2). More broadly, the book ‘seeks to draw elements enlightening for our research and critical practice. . .’ (5). In the spirit of remaining true to the book’s aims and intentions, this review reflects on what the book does and does very well; what the book does not do and just as well; and what the book does not do, but perhaps needed to.
The first thing to note is the quality of scholarship on display throughout the book. Chapters demonstrate the in-depth nature of contributors’ readings of Bourdieu and Marx’s work, and the sizeable, and in some cases not so sizeable, literatures to grow up around aspects of their respective work. More than this, the matter of Bourdieu’s engagement with and appropriation of the work of Marx and Marxist thought, is broached in a range of thought-provoking and critically reflexive ways. Some chapters are more exegetical in approach, offering very close re-readings of foundational, and in some cases less influential, texts, concepts and themes, using these as a basis for reconsidering avenues of enquiry which to date remain unresolved and/or insufficiently explored; others identify ‘blind spots’ or weaknesses in Marx and Bourdieu’s thought with the aim of critically assessing what stands to be gained from supplying or fortifying these with further recourse to concepts and critical techniques developed by either/or both of them; and other chapters still, draw to attention how elements of the work of Marx and Bourdieu can or could be combined used to think with and/or think against the work of various classical and modern thinkers and theorists in new and productive ways.
The structure of the book works very well and is organised into three related but distinct parts. Each part takes ‘critique’ as its central analytic focus, both as it shapes and is shaped by the organising themes of ‘practice’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘interpretation’. The merit of using these more general themes to organise and appraise the modes by which Bourdieu sought to appropriate Marx, is that contributors have been able to cast their analytical nets far and wide. This is so in two main ways: in the first instance, as it relates to the attempts of contributors to critically (re)consider convergences and divergences characteristic of the encounter between their respective of bodies of work; and in the second, as it relates to the task of using Bourdieu and Marx for thinking with and thinking against aspects of various ‘big name’ thinkers including but not limited to: Foucault (chapter 2); Elias (chapter 3); Gramsci (chapters 5 and 7); Weber (chapter 7) etc. As such, the book stimulates far more than just a critical re-appraisal of the encounter between Bourdieu and Marx. It invites us to consider the significance of their encounter in relation to a wide range of social theoretical paradigms and programmes of critical research.
Of the many exquisite one-liners turned out by Bourdieu over the years, one of my favourites, which I have tried very hard to find but cannot recall which of his books I read it in, runs approximately as follows: ‘it is precisely because agents do not fully know why they do what they do, that what they do has more significance than they know’. I love that line. It will remain forever with me – well, approximately at least until I can find it again. It seems even more insightful now that I realise that its inverse rings equally true. That is, the significant merits of this book can be attributed as much to what the various contributors do not do. To what extent this was (not) done knowingly, I cannot profess to know.
They do not engage in the practice of uncritically reproducing many of the very staid criticisms to have attached to Bourdieu, those criticisms having become somewhat de rigueur when dealing with and appraising his work. As such, contributors do not once again make allegations about Bourdieu being overly deterministic; they do not chastise Bourdieu for ‘failing’ to insufficiently address intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and so on; and they do not accuse Bourdieu of playing down the influence of some or another thinker before swiftly turning to argue the case for why he is in fact significantly indebted to them.
These criticisms, and others related to them, are indeed taken up and (re)considered in various chapters. Crucially, however, this is done in a way which does not involve seeking to depict Bourdieu’s work as beyond conceptual redemption such that it requires to be set aside to make way for whichever theorist or theoretical perspective those making such claims happen to be championing. The approach instead is to reconsider the ongoing value and untapped potentialities of Bourdieu’s work, both on its own terms and vis-à-vis that of Marx despite, and in some cases in spite of, various of the above-mentioned and tedious modes of criticism.
A further laudable aspect of the book is that it does not engage with those versions of Bourdieu, and the works corresponding to them, which are the versions that have been done to death and that show no sign of abating since his death (Thorpe and Inglis, 2023). That the majority of contributors comprise scholars not socialised into Anglophone intellectual fields and institutional formations is, I would suggest, part of the key to understanding why. It is worth to say something more about this as it relates to the freshness of the book’s thematic preoccupations, analytic foci, and the lines of enquiry developed within it.
In her introductory chapter, Paolucci draws attention to the processes by which ideas produced in one place are taken up, ‘re-’, and ‘mis-’ appropriated in others. Here she refers to both Marx and Bourdieu’s remarks on such matters. Doing so reminds the reader of the various and often subtle processes that occur as part of the internationalisation of ideas and the fields through which they pass. In different contexts, what Bourdieu and Marx’s work has been made to mean, as well as being made not to mean, differs in partially (in-)significant ways from what they are understood (not) to mean in others. The result is a situation in which talk of ‘Marx’ or ‘Bourdieu’ in the singular is, in a certain sense, redundant. Different intellectual contexts shape and are shaped by differences in the versions, and visions, of Marx and Bourdieu to grow up, take hold, and circulate within them.
It was an interesting exercise, precisely the kind one imagines Bourdieu himself would have undertaken and reflected on, to read through the biographies of the various contributors with one eye on considering how and in what ways their respective contributions refract similarities and differences in the patterning effects of the (inter-)national intellectual fields in which they are positioned and occupy position-takings. Academics, like texts, travel. Unlike texts, however, academics take their contexts with them in the form of the accumulated and patterned dispositions, affinities, and practices peculiar to the intellectual fields into which they were socialised and socialised into them. The scholarly modes of vision and division brought to life through contributors’ chapters are rooted in and refract differences in the readings of Bourdieu and Marx peculiar to the French and Italian (national) contexts in particular, the contexts in which the majority of contributors were trained and are currently situated. The freshness of many of the chapters and concerns organising them is at least partly attributable to this.
All of this is a way of reflecting on what I found to be, having been socialised into and situated within the peculiarities of the British academic context, three things in particular.
First, that relatively few scholars in the British context ‘see’ or (have) use(d) Bourdieu first and foremost as a critic of neo-liberalism, economic ‘science’ and phenomena (see Part 2 of the book for a discussion of these issues more generally, and chapter 8 by Streiksen and chapter 11 by Lebaron in particular). Virtually everyone has (claimed to have) read La Distinction. But how many sociologists in Britain (have) read and use(d) works such as The Social Structures of the Economy and Acts of Resistance, parts 1 and 2, as core texts with which to put Bourdieu to work?
Second, and following on from this, the book underscores the extent to which Bourdieu, notwithstanding the scale and scope of his output, has become narrowly reduced within much British-based sociology to serving as a critic of the cultural bourgeoisie and the reproduction of bourgeois cultural tastes and practices, both more diffusely but within the field of education specifically.
Third, it is while reading books such as this, that one is reminded of the very constricted channels into which one’s own thinking about and relating to, in this case the legacies of Bourdieu and Marx, becomes exactly that – constricted by the doxa of the (inter-)nationally – patterned games into which one happened to be socialised and which one largely (un)knowingly tends to reproduce in highly routinised and not particularly critical ways.
A not insignificant part of what is best about this book is that it comprises essays written predominantly by scholars both trained and who have remained within non-Anglophone intellectual fields. Whether this was intentional and fully thought out, or not, the point still stands. Further considered in this way, the book resonates with recent international controversies centring on issues of cultural repatriation. In the case of this book, it has meant handing back to a cadre of largely Western European thinkers – of which Marx and Bourdieu comprised two – the intellectual legacies of two thinkers whose work and the critical interpretation thereof has tended to be dominated by scholars operating within the sphere (of concerns) of Anglophone sociology and social theory. The merits to have accrued from this act of repatriation are plain to see.
The book would have benefitted from a more ‘standard’ introduction. It is worth to recall that the book carries a foreword written by Mike Savage. Therein Savage provides a very clearly written account of the book’s aims, foci and themes, the nature of their distribution across the various parts and chapters, and the wider social, economic, and intellectual developments to which the book is in part a response and partly responds. Savage’s foreword plays the part of what might have otherwise served as a very clearly rendered introduction to the book. To suggest this is not intended to detract from the intellectual merits of Paolluci’s introductory chapter, which provides a very thorough and thought-provoking discussion of ‘inheritance’, both as concept and practice. Rather, it is to suggest that Paolucci manages to do far more than, at the same time as not doing not quite enough of, what one expects or would like for an introductory chapter to do.
The book has no conclusion. Call me old-fashioned (I know that you will) but I like the books I read to have a conclusion. In the case of this book, because the range of critical interventions, calls and novel lines of enquiry contained within it warrant a chapter that distilled them down with the aim of rendering them totally clear and clearly actionable. The obvious retort to this would be to note that for a book such as this, a conclusion would have risked betraying the critical spirit in which it was written and the thinkers whose work it seeks to breathe new life into. Critical thought, particularly as imagined and practiced by Bourdieu and Marx, can never be critical enough. It is compelled by the logic of the dialectic to go beyond itself precisely at the moment it reckons itself to have arrived. In a certain sense, to conclude would be to set up new structures of thought and practice in the knowledge that they will require to be pulled down on account of the constraining effects they inevitably come to produce.
That is fine. But the book gives expression to more than enough ideas and avenues of inquiry with which to launch the next round of Marx and Bourdieu-inspired forms of critique and critical practice. This is one of the book’s main aims after all. As merely one case in point, I am inclined to cite Bridget Fowler’s chapter (chapter 3). Clearly and eloquently crafted, Fowler manages to compress into a very tight space a formidable amount of thought centring on the convergences and untapped potentialities afforded by different dimensions of the work of Marx, Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, no less. As I read it, Fowler’s contribution marks out the analytical parameters for a very fertile programme of research which could and should be pursued both now and in the future. A concluding chapter in which some attempt to explicitly articulate the call for others to pick up where Fowler, to cite merely one contributor, left off, would have been good to see.
The final thing I would say is this. The proviso is that I am about to be guilty of doing that irritating thing reviewers sometimes do when they conflate what they wanted to see in the work they are reviewing for what the authors themselves set out to do and, in the case of this book, do very well. I think that a chapter that explicitly reflected on the possibilities and constraints of current intellectual and institutional conditions vis-à-vis the inter-generational transmission of knowledge and critical appropriations of the work of Marx and Bourdieu, would have been a very timely one.
More and more when I take books such as this one into my hands, committing to invest both my time and self into reading them, which, let us be honest, increasingly means reading in the evenings after work and over weekends, I find myself genuinely worrying about the present and future state of intellectual life, particularly when considered from the point of view of the not-so-distant past. As discussed in many of the chapters, and by Savage too in his preface, ‘time’ and ‘history’ comprise central analytic categories within the thought of Bourdieu and Marx. As the autonomy of a broadening range of national intellectual fields continues to be eroded, something Bourdieu was acutely aware of and railed against in his (later) work and across a range of public-facing forums too, time and history take on a renewed and alarming significance. This is so in two main ways.
First, the institutional conditions necessary for producing forms of critical analysis rooted in scholarship and knowledge of wider historical processes, the very kinds produced to such devastating critical effect by Marx and Bourdieu, are rapidly being undermined. As scholarly forms of interest and practice become ever more yoked to the immediacy of the present, the use of history as comparative framework with and in which to construct and develop and deploy new forms of critical thinking and practice diminish in equal measure. As two thinkers for whom history and critical social analysis were inextricably bound up, and whose work it takes a lot of time and knowledge of history to read, absorb and (critically) (re)consider, I worry about the future of the discipline when the very dispositions and resources necessary for producing critical historical sociological work in the mould of Marx or Bourdieu are being so rapidly eroded. The developments and processes by which this occurs, both clear and obvious on one level, often subtle and insidious on another, Bourdieu (1998 [1996]) likened to the ‘erosion of a coastal shelf’. But such processes and the critical analysis of them should be of paramount concern for anyone who cares about the state of intellectual life now and in the future.
Second, the institutional conditions for inculcating into current and future generations of students the intellectual dispositions and forms of capital - knowledge of history and the history of social theory – necessary for accessing and engaging with thinkers such as Marx and Bourdieu, are similarly being eroded at an alarming rate. Over the course of the last 4 years, the time allocated to social theory teaching at the institution where I work has been halved. As the saying goes, ‘tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance’. I imagine I am not alone when I say that the struggle to retain any nuance in my teaching of the work of Marx and Bourdieu only gets more difficult. A chapter that considered how and in what ways, collectively, we might try to ‘fire back against the tyranny of the market’ and the mounting difficulties confronting those of us charged with distributing to students the rich intellectual inheritance bequeathed by Marx and Bourdieu, would have been a valuable and not inconsistent one given the books aims. Speculatively, I wonder if the absence of such a chapter means that the levels of marketisation and heteronomisation of the intellectual fields in which many of the contributors are situated is yet to encroach upon their intellectual and pedagogic practice in the ways typified by (so called) intellectual life as constituted within institutional arrangements in Britain, Australasia and North America.
Sociology and social theory are all the richer for books such as Marx and Bourdieu: Practices of Critique. As much for what they do as what they do not do. For the legacies of Marx and Bourdieu to remain inspiring, generative, and current, we need forms of scholarly engagement with them such as the one offered up in this collection of critically engaged and highly engaging essays. That is, we need forms of scholarship which recognise that suppression of criticism is not the best way to express solidarity.
Books such as the one I have reviewed here are essential for ensuring that the presences of the dead, and the spirit in which they lived and practiced their thinking, are brought to life anew and remain with us. More than this, such books act as a vital corrective to the tendency for critical thought to ossify into collectively enacted forms and forms of practice, which by virtue of the routinised and patterned ways in which they come to be reproduced, are condemned to lose the critical bite they once possessed. In order that the deadweight of routinisation be prevented from exacting its blunting effects the further forward in time that we travel, it is vital that we continue to rethink and reconfigure the images that we hold of particular thinkers and the relations through which their work is conjoined and contested. Doing so ensures that we can carry into the future from the past the resources we need for getting to grips with and trying to take back some element of control over whatever version of the ‘present’ we happen to be born into.
