New book in French: Pourquoi Bourdieu?
Posted by dnetz on March 12, 2008
There’s a new book by Nathalie Heinich, research director at CNRS an former disciple of Bourdieu (well, OK, it’s not sooo new, it appeared with Gallimard in september 2007), in which she seems to criticize him sharply.
The editors say:
Le renom de Pierre Bourdieu s’étend aujourd’hui bien au-delà de la sociologie, au-delà de l’Université, au-delà du public cultivé, au-delà de la France. Que s’est-il donc passé pour qu’un universitaire, fils de petits employés béarnais “monté” à Paris pour faire l’École normale supérieure, devienne, le temps d’une génération, ce phénomène international ; “Bourdieu”?
Ni hagiographie à l’usage des bourdieusiens, ni pamphlet à l’usage des anti-bourdieusiens, ni analyse épistémologique à l’usage des spécialistes, ni essai de vulgarisation à l’usage de profanes, ce portrait intellectuel brossé par une ex-disciple qui a pris, depuis, ses distances, est une tentative pour comprendre, avec les outils de la sociologie et à travers le témoignage en première personne, les raisons d’un tel succès.
My translation (excuse the occasional mistake):
Pierre Bourdieu’s reputation today extends far beyond sociology, beyond the university, beyond the cultivated public, beyond France. How did it happen that an academic who was the son of petty employees from Béarn and had ‘climbed’ up to Paris to attend the École normale supérieure became, in the time of one generation, that international phenomenon: ‘Bourdieu’? Neither hagiography for the use of bourdieusians, pamphlet for the use of anti-bourdieusians, epistemological analysis for the use of specialists nor attempt at vulgarisation for the use of the profane, this intellectual portrait outlined by an ex-disciple who has since taken her distance is an attempt to comprehend, using the tools of sociology and through first-person testimony, the reasons for such a success.
The book seems to have provoked a bit of debate in France, in which the author has herself intervened. In February, she published an article in Le Monde des Livres, to strengthen the accusation against Bourdieu of having been a “radicalist”. So she seems to be trying to join in the business of wrongly separating an ‘early, scientifically solid’ and a ‘late, ideologically radical’ Bourdieu that some in France have been in engaged in for years and that Bourdieu always vigorously rejected in his lifetime. It amounts to another attempt to impose on social science a concept of scientificity adapted from the natural sciences that just isn’t its own and that would make it lose most of its scientific potential. She’s rightly debunked for the ‘radicalism’ claim here.
