The article proposes to reexamine Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism, and more particularly with Althusserian Marxism. It is suggested here that Althusser may have functioned as a foil for Bourdieu, especially because of the similarities between the Althusserian theory of ideological power and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power. The theory of the State is probably the most appropriate ground on which to compare the two thinkers. The recent publication of Bourdieu’s lectures on the State allows one to see how he elaborated (...) within his own historical sociology a theory of the State which is a response to Marxism : by responding to the Marxist critique of Hegel, Bourdieu seeks to show that the dominant, since they invoke the universal in order to legitimize their domination, can be only partially successful in doing so. Bourdieu ends up by conceding to Marxism that the universal makes significant progress only within the terms of the self-interested understanding of the universal which is proper to the dominant. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: an all-purpose denunciatory category; ‘the way things are’; an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; a dominant ideology of global capitalism; a form of governmentality and hegemony; and a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It (...) is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

ome Remarks on the Crisis of Capitalism What are the causes and consequences of the crisis of capitalism ? What are the plausible scenarios forthe outcome of the crisis ? To what extent is the current crisis comparable to that of 1929, and to whatextent does it differ from the crisis of the 1970s ? To what extent can one speak of a crisis of neoliberalism ? These are some of the questions which the authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism (...) address here. (shrink)