Peasants into Revolutionaries?

The broad details of Pierre Bourdieu's background and early intellectual career have been well documented, both in existing critical studies and in interviews. He was born in 1930, the son of a postman in a peasant community in the Béarn in the French Pyrenees. Having passed through the classes préparatoires at the renowned Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he entered the elite École normale supérieure to study for an agrégation in philosophy, perhaps the most prestigious academic qualification in France at that time. Bourdieu obtained his agrégation in 1954 but, frustrated by the abstract tenor of academic philosophy, he abandoned his plans to prepare a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and took up a post as a philosophy teacher in a provincial lycée instead. His career as a philosophy teacher was short-lived and in 1955 he was drafted into the French Army and sent to Algeria where he served as a conscript during the Algerian War of Independence. His military service completed, Bourdieu remained in Algeria, working as an assistant in the Faculté des lettres of Algiers University, whilst carrying out fieldwork in the country's cities, villages, and 'resettlement centres'. In 1960, he returned to France to become Raymond Aron's assistant at the Sorbonne. On the basis of his fieldwork in Algeria, Bourdieu published a series of books and articles between 1958 and 1964 which examined the country's social, economic, and political development. As Bourdieu has put it, if he arrived in Algeria in 1955 a philosopher, by the time he left he had become a sociologist (Honneth et al. 1986).

Although Bourdieu's experiences in Algeria clearly represent a founding moment in his intellectual career, his early Algerian work has received relatively little critical attention to date. This is presumably because the work largely pre-dates the elaboration of such key Bourdieusian concepts as 'habitus', 'field', 'cultural capital' or 'symbolic violence', whilst its subject matter appears tangential to the analyses of class, culture and social reproduction upon which Bourdieu's mature reputation rests. Nonetheless, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate, these early studies of Algeria are important for the insights they offer into the way Bourdieu theorises social and cultural change, insights which will prove vital to an understanding of his later work on sociocultural change in French society. It was in the course of his work on the Algerian peasantry and sub-proletariat that Bourdieu was to lay the theoretical foundations of his later studies, anticipating in important respects concepts such as 'habitus', 'practice' and 'field'. On a more general level, Bourdieu's decision to abandon his philosophical studies in favour of a 'scientific' practice of sociology can tell us much about how he understands his own position within the French intellectual field.

Sociology over Philosophy

In subsequent accounts of his very early career, Bourdieu has suggested that his modest social background, his consequent sense of being an outsider in the Parisian intellectual field, and his frustration at the limitations of academic philosophy were all linked to his decision to undertake empirical sociological studies of Algeria and hence to his 'conversion' from philosopher into sociologist. To practise 'scientific' sociology, in Bourdieu's terms, demands achieving an objective distance on the hidden workings of the social world. To be an outsider is already to be endowed with such a distance, whilst to be an outsider who has nonetheless achieved academic success is to supplement that instinctive feeling of distance with a 'mastery of scientific culture'. Thus, he argues that 'to combine an advanced mastery of scientific culture' with 'a certain revolt against or distance from that culture (most often rooted in an estranged experience of the academic universe)' is to possess a socially determined disposition towards the practice of scientific sociology (Bourdieu 1992, p. 218 [p. 249]). As Bourdieu was to put it in an interview many years after the Algerian War:

This more or less unhappy integration into the intellectual field may well have been the reason for my activity in Algeria. I could not be content with reading left-wing newspapers or signing petitions; I had to do something concrete, as a scientist. ... That's where my 'scientific bias' stems from. (in Honneth et al. 1986, p. 39)

Conducting empirical sociological research not only seemed to represent a more 'concrete' form of activity than pursuing the abstractions of academic philosophy, it also, Bourdieu has argued, offered the possibility of an 'objective', 'scientific' assessment of the situation in Algeria not available to those who commented from the sidelines. Whilst acknowledging the importance of the stand taken by intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Jeanson, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet 'against torture and for peace', he has explained that he was 'concerned about the associated utopianism'since 'it was not at all helpful, even for an independent Algeria, to feed a mythical conception of Algerian society'. Bourdieu has singled out Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre 1961) for particular criticism, stating the book contained 'dangerous' analyses engendering 'a pernicious utopianism' amongst Algerian intellectuals. His own work of the period sought to challenge Fanon's assertion that the Algerian peasantry and sub-proletariat constituted a revolutionary force, a challenge supported by detailed empirical research, by 'observation and measurement, not through reflecting upon secondhand material'. Thus, the Algerian War was to find Bourdieu 'between camps' in terms of the French intellectual field, opposed to the continued French colonial presence in Algeria but critical of the analyses offered by some of those French intellectuals who supported the struggle for Algerian independence (in Honneth et al. 1986, pp. 38–40).

The account Bourdieu offers here of his conversion to sociology highlights his firm belief in the pre-eminence of an empirically-informed practice of 'scientific' sociology over what he sees as the abstract and ahistorical theorising of a particular form of French academic philosophy; 'the philosophical babble found in academic institutions' (1987, p. 13 [p. 5]). To recognise the importance of Bourdieu's account both of his own position and of the position of sociology in the intellectual field is not necessarily to accept that account unreservedly. Bourdieu clearly sees this account as a scientific objectification of his position in the intellectual field. However, it derives much of its force from an essentially rhetorical claim to greater personal authenticity and good faith, combined with an invocation of profoundly subjective feelings of alienation, which, however...