The article builds on a recent literature that has sought to underscore the relevance of Bourdieu’s field theory for historical-sociological analysis. It draws attention to symbolic revolutions, a concept that has been given short shrift in this literature and even in Bourdieu’s own expositions of his field-theoretical apparatus. The article argues that symbolic revolutions denote a universal mechanism of field-internal change which extends and complements a conceptual battery of mostly structural universals of fields. In a synoptic reading of Bourdieu’s field-theoretical (...) work, the article fleshes out an ideal type of symbolic revolutions, with special regard to its dialectical features. It adds further analytical purchase to the concept by highlighting continuities and parallels with the work of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Mannheim. Finally, it argues that more recent studies by other authors on transformations in the psychiatric field, the field of social and human sciences, and the political field are in fact discussing instances of symbolic revolutions. It thus shows how the concept can help identify common properties among highly heterogeneous phenomena, opening up new avenues for historical-sociological investigations that can more systematically relate the general and the particular. (shrink)

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter-community relations. (shrink)

Bernard Lahire’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology aims to establish a ‘dispositionalist-contextualist’ vision of human agency capable of fully sociologising biography and individuality. While accepting the utility of the notion of field, Lahire emphasises the plurality of non-field entities – including games, worlds and figurations – shaping people’s dispositions and the contexts in which they come to act, leading him to downgrade the notion of habitus and cast fields as only a small part of the picture. While appreciating the motivation (...) underpinning Lahire’s project and the usefulness of some of his research-led insights, this article argues that his skewed and partial reading of Bourdieu blinds him to the fact that solutions to some of the problems he identifies are already there in Bourdieu’s framework and, indeed, that these are more coherent and comprehensive than some of the conceptual suggestions Lahire offers. (shrink)

This article sets out the basic principles of a new theory of intellectual interventions centred round the notion of positioning. Intellectual interventions are seen as ways in which intellectuals locate themselves in the socio-political and intellectual field, thereby also positioning others. The existing contributions to the study of intellectuals often take the self-concepts or dispositions of intellectuals to be fixed, and they tend to focus on the causes and motivations behind intellectual interventions. Challenging this perspective, the theory proposed substitutes a (...) vocabulary of effects for the existing vocabulary of intentions and causes: rather than speculating on the sociological determinants or purposes that underlie an intellectual intervention, this theory explores its effects for the symbolic and institutional recognition of the author(s) and for the diffusion of the ideas propagated. (shrink)

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into (...) oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification. (shrink)

Current sociology of knowledge tends to take for granted Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage: successful ideas bring recognition to their authors, successful authors have their ideas recognized more easily than unknown ones. This article argues that this theory should be revised via the introduction of the differential between the status of an idea and that of its creator: when an idea is more important than its creator, the latter becomes identified with the former, and this will hinder recognition (...) of the intellectual’s new ideas as they differ from old ones in their content or style. Robert N. Bellah’s performance during the “civil religion debate” of the 1970s is reconstructed as an example of how this mechanism may work. Implications for further research are considered in the concluding section. (shrink)

This article seeks to investigate art in public urban space via a process of activating aesthetics as a way of enhancing pedagogies of engagement. It does this firstly by addressing the question of aesthetics in Enlightenment and twentieth-century frames; then it seeks to understand how artworks may be approached ontologically and epistemologically. The discussion works with the philosophical lenses of two different thinkers: Heidegger, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and Marxist sociologist, Bourdieu with (...) his work on a theory of practice and habitus. It asks how art may work in the meaning-making processes of place and the human subject in terms of ontological difference and dispositional capital. In bringing these different organising principles of interpretation to specific works of art, the discussion draws from locational research undertaken in Newcastle/gateshead and Melbourne. (shrink)

A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various antinomies, are shown to vacillate (...) between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to the view that Heidegger is unable to account for the possibility of immediately experiencing others in their concrete particularity. Critics have argued that since Mitsein characterizes Dasein’s mode of being regardless of the presence or absence of others, Heidegger has essentially granted it the status of an a priori category. In doing so, they argue, Heidegger reduces the other to a mere interchangeable token whose uniqueness is subsumed under the generality of the established category. (...) In contrast, I argue that the Heideggerian ‘a priori’ must be understood as a living responsiveness to particularity, not a top-down imposition of abstract categoriality. The argument further shows that this responsiveness must be understood in terms of temporal particularity. The bulk of the paper then demonstrates the nature of such responsiveness when it is the temporal particularity of the other Dasein that is being encountered. I show that such encounters are a necessary condition for the possibility of world time and the worldly space of shared significance. Because my encounter with the other Dasein is a direct experience of her originary temporality—the fundamental expression of her concrete care-defined way of being—such encounters are not simple subsumptions of the other to an a priori category. They are, rather, a temporal responsiveness to the unique mode of intuitive givenness characterizing other Dasein. (shrink)

While working on an auto-ethnographic account of my deafness and concurrently offering a seminar on the philosophical dimensions of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, I was struck by how permeated my ethnographic language was with the very Bourdieu-ian concepts I was examining. Initially, some of the moments captured in the ethnography played docilely a function of exemplification of Bourdieu’s theories and the philosophies behind them. At times, however, I found that my description of certain states of being/hearing invited a more complex three-way (...) conversation, pointing to some productive tensions between the anthropological, sociological and philosophical dimensions of critical thought. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue outlines the significance of Randall Collins’s contribution to sociology. The first section briefly reviews Collins’s main books and assesses their impact on social science. The second section offers a summary overview of the papers that comprise the special issue.

In constructing his renowned theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have integrated the key insights from phenomenology and successfully melded them with objectivist analysis. The contention here, however, is that while his vision of the social world may indeed be generally laudable, he did not take enough from phenomenology. More specifically, there are two concepts in Alfred Schutz 's body of work, which, if properly defined, disentangled from phenomenology, and appropriated, allow two frequently forwarded criticisms of Bourdieu's perspective to (...) be overcome: on the one hand, a particular interpretation of the concept of lifeworld can remedy identified weaknesses on the problem of individuation; while on the other hand, Schutz 's notion of the stock of knowledge can rectify Bourdieu's overly nonconscious depiction of agency. Given my overall support for Bourdieu's scheme and the fact that the extant criticisms on these two grounds are often excessive and obfuscatory, both the suggested elaborations will be prefaced by a clarificatory partial defense of his position. (shrink)

This is the Introduction to a collected volume.

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, (...) Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the dichotomy between individuals, as bearers of unique and freely chosen identities, and the masses, as the large numbers of others who are conforming and uncritical, should be understood as a constructed dichotomy. This dichotomy is both supported and dismantled in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Each of these thinkers reinforced the idea that there exist conforming and threatening masses from which individuals should separate themselves. And yet by theorizing the limitations (...) and contextual nature of individual identity, they have also provided the foundations for revealing the dichotomy as illusory as well as problematic for reasoned thought and politics. The significance of this argument is that the fear of sameness and conformity within modern mass society creates a serious obstacle to broad based and democratic political engagement among people. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)

Zeev Sternhell and Hans Sluga show that fascism and Nazism were part of an early twentieth?century intellectual rebellion against universalism, liberalism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Western technology, values, and political institutions were seen as outmoded, but instead of wanting to return to the traditions of the past, as conservatives wished, these intellectuals thought that fascism could transcend modernity. Sorel, Heidegger, and other fascist modernists offered different radical solutions to what was conceived of as the decadence of liberal Western civilization. It remains (...) an open question whether the discontent with modernity is an intellectual construction or a result of actual defects in modern life itself. (shrink)

In this paper I use critical discourse theory to understand the strategies of the ‘princes’ of the contemporary world. Using Bourdieu's concepts of ‘field’ and ‘homology’ and Agamben's postulate of the ‘permanent state of emergency’, I address data from the political field and from the corporate field to ask whether the discourse of the ‘leader’ as authentic decision-maker can be transferred across fields and whether the associated paradigm of ‘the permanent state of emergency’ may also be circulating between the political (...) field and the corporate field – and if these processes are taking place, whether they are being technologised as a political and business strategy. The paper concludes that this may indeed be happening and that therefore a renewed focus on informed democracy, governance, and law rather than on the figure of the post-bureaucratic leader is needed in these critical times. (shrink)

This work analyzes the central role of interpretation in non-routine design. Based on this analysis, a theory of computer support for interpretation in cooperative design is constructed. The theory is grounded in studies of design and interpretation. It is illustrated by mechanisms provided by a software substrate for computer-based design environments, applied to a sample task of lunar habitat design. ;Computer support of innovative design must overcome the problem that designers necessarily make extensive use of situated tacit understanding while computers (...) can only store and display explicit representations of information. The automation techniques used for routine design are not applicable: techniques are needed to support creative, tacit human understanding with explicit computer representations. ;The process by which designers transform their tacit preunderstanding into explicit knowledge is termed "interpretation". Interpretation is necessary for solving design problems and collaborating with other designers. Considerable explicit knowledge is thereby generated in the natural course of designing. Often this knowledge includes the most valuable information that can be presented to designers who revisit these design projects or undertake similar projects in the future. If representations of this knowledge have been defined using computer-based design support systems, then the representations can be captured by these systems for the support of subsequent design work. ;A theory of computer support for interpretation in design is presented in three stages. First, the role of interpretation in design is explored by reviewing descriptions of design by Alexander, Rittel, and Schon; by conducting a protocol analysis of lunar habitat design; and by applying Heidegger's philosophy of situated interpretation. Second, this analysis of interpretation is extended to define a theory of computer support. The features of this theory--support for the situated, perspectival, and linguistic characteristics of interpretation--are used to evaluate previous work on software design rationale systems. Third, design principles are discussed for H scERMES, a prototype hypermedia substrate for building computer-based design environments to support interpretation in tasks like lunar habitat design. The hypermedia integrates a perspectives mechanism and an end-user language to capture and modify representations of the design situation, alternative perspectives on design tasks, and terminology for conceptualizing design issues. (shrink)

An important shift occurs in Martin Heidegger’s thinking one year after the publication of Being and Time , in the Appendix to the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic . The shift is from his project of fundamental ontology—which provides an existential analysis of human existence on an ontological level—to metontology . Metontology is a neologism that refers to the ontic sphere of human experience and to the regional ontologies that were excluded from Being and Time. It is within metontology, Heidegger states, (...) that “the question of ethics may be raised for the first time.” This paper makes explicit both Heidegger’s argument for metontology , and the relation between metontology and ethics. In examining what he means by “the art of existing,” the paper argues that there is an ethical dimension to Heidegger’s thinking that corresponds to a moderate form of moral particularism. In order to justify this position, a comparative analysis is made between Heidegger, Aristotle, and Bernard Williams. (shrink)

The thesis adapts Bourdieu’s theory of hexis as a method for approaching the Baillie (Hegel/Baillie, 1910/1931) and Pinkard (Hegel/Pinkard, 2008) translations of Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hegel, 1807/1970) as embodiments of a translatorial practice informed by social and philosophical contextual factors. The theoretical concept of a translatorial hexis is analogous to Bourdieu’s habitus but differs in that the translatorial hexis embodies a specifically dominant, honour-seeking stance of the translator with regard to the micro-dynamics of the surrounding sub-fields; the translatorial (...) hexis is also embodied primarily in the detail of the text and in the peritexts to the translations. Chapters 3 and 4, which focus on the Baillie and Pinkard translations, are each divided into three sections: an analysis of the historical background to the translation in terms of interrelated Bourdieusian fields defined by rival positions vying for academic reputation; an analysis of lexical patterning identified in TT corpora with reference to the translations of two ‘dialectically ambiguous’ terms Geist [mind/spirit] and aufheben [cancel/preserve/sublate]; an analysis of peritexts to the two translations. Starting with a discussion of Hegel’s ‘dialectical ambiguity’ in chapter 1 and an elaboration of the Bourdieusian theoretical framework in chapter 2, the thesis attempts to explain the lexical findings with reference to the concept of translatorial hexis in a manner which takes philosophical and sociological factors into consideration as determinants of the translators’ strategies. The analysis focuses on the positioning of Sir James Black Baillie with regard to Absolutist and Personalist versions of British Idealism and Terry Pinkard with regard to the non-metaphysical readings of Hegel and the development of communitarian ideologies.The publication of new translations of Hegel’s works and new critical works on German Idealism suggest that a Hegel revival is in full progress. Given the centrality of translation to this phenomenon, it is appropriate that translation studies should contribute to the discussion, especially to demonstrate the value of a self-reflexive, multi-disciplinary approach which brings linguistic analysis and sociological contextualisation to bear on some of the philosophical issues at stake. (shrink)

This article offers a new explanation for the sudden rise in popularity of French existentialism, in particular of Sartre’s version, in the mid-1940s. It develops a multidimensional account that recognizes both structural and cultural factors. The explanation differs from, and more fully addresses the complexity of the situation than, the two most prominent existing explanations: namely Anna Boschetti’s Bourdieu-inspired account and Randall Collins’s network-based approach. It is argued that, because of specific socio-political circumstances, the intellectual establishment became tainted and lost (...) legitimacy, with its aesthetic and philosophical views now regarded as outdated if not politically dangerous. This hiatus brought unprecedented publishing opportunities for a new philosophical current, and skilful public performances by the main protagonists helped its ascendancy. Most importantly, existentialist writers colluded with de Gaulle in portraying a cohesive and defiant French nation; and their philosophy, especially in its notion of responsibility, enabled sections of French society to assimilate and make sense of the recent past, whilst drawing a line underneath it so as to move forward. (shrink)