Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action

“Political Interventions” is another one of those books that have been around in French and German for years and are just now being published in English. Actually, it’s not a monograph but a collection of short texts, documenting the range of Bourdieu’s political engagements – from opposing the war in Algeria to his restless critique of global ultra-liberalism in the late 1990s – and portraying him as a thoroughly political thinker who kept trying to connect his scientific work to social movements. It’s worth the read!

Times Higher Ed has a pretty good review by Nick Prior:

Readers familiar with Bourdieu’s work will find the short theoretical summaries less interesting than the scraps of polemic designed to inform and energise various political publics. These are the letters, statements, declarations of intent and interviews, some sourced from the archives of the Collège de France and published for the first time. Like the Communist Manifesto, these fragments cut to the chase with little modesty. They exhort the reader, often impatiently, to fight for a “realpolitik of reason” in which a restless critique of the “imperialism of universality” is married with a staunch defence of the intellectual instruments of reason. They also show Bourdieu wrestling with a striking paradox in which a compulsion to open his mouth and promote the political effectiveness of intellectuals is all the more effective if the autonomy of the intellectual from political and economic fields is optimum. [...]

If sociology is indeed a way of doing politics by other means, maybe our biggest loss will be the absence of a champion who did most to convince the world that a rigorous but committed sociopolitics was possible. Certainly, we are impoverished by his passing at a time when it is more necessary than ever to renew the strength of intellectual criticism.