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The paper first offers a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student at the École Normale Supérieure. It indicates the intellectual influences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and then examines his use of the work of Weber in his first book, Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieu's thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu's 'Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945' (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieu's critiques of Weber at this time and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber's epistemology logically became a dissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on Bourdieu's part to see reflexivity as a means to problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to refining it or making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subsequently in Bourdieu's thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to a sociology of knowledge via an autoanalysis of a marginalised member of the British upper-middle class, who moved first from the South to the North of England and then from England to Scottish society as an immigrant: a 'stranger who stayed'. Written in the first person, Bridget Fowler's reflections move between different religious and political worlds, focusing especially on her reception of conflicting sociological theories and her own development through these. Influenced by five exceptionally learned and lucid sociologists – John Rex, Herminio Martins, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Lovell – she has spent her sociological career contributing to the demystification of power in various forms. In particular she has focused on the significance of secular culture – notably literature – in creating hegemonic domination. She has also analysed the role of symbolic revolutions in social transformation, avoiding in this respect falling either into idealism or simplistic class reductionism. Arguing that sociological theory still needs to teach Marx, Weber and Durkheim, these founding figures should not be seen as creating – in social scientific terms – a unified architectural construction, but should be read with and against one another; further, they need also to be combined with other, more contemporary, influences. Finally whilst noting the existential salience of movements around identity – nation, gender, sexuality and disability – she argues that the discipline must continue to reach out 'beyond the fragments', to address social totalities more broadly, including wider issues of social space and structures of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014–2015, Aksu Akçaoğlu was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to work with Loïc Wacquant on his research on “the conservative habitus” in contemporary Turkey (with the support of the TÜBİTAK Science Program). In this dialogue, he invites Wacquant to explicate the philosophy and pedagogy of his celebrated Berkeley seminar on Pierre Bourdieu. This provides an opportunity to revisit key conceptual nodes in Bourdieu’s work, to spotlight its anti-theoreticist cast as well as the influences of Bachelard and Cassirer; to clarify the relationships between social space, field, and symbolic power; and to warn against the seductions of “speaking Bourdieuese.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu’s recasting of the question of class exemplifies the major features of his sociology and the way he extends, melds, and mends classical views into a distinctive framework. Bourdieu’s approach is relational, agonistic, and synthetic; it spotlights the symbolic dimension of group formation as practical achievement while fusing theory and research, and it introduces multiple correspondence analysis as a statistical technique suited to grasping constellations of plural capitals. Bourdieu reformulates the problem of domination by questioning the ontological status of collectives and by forging tools for elucidating the politics of group-making: the sociosymbolic alchemy whereby a mental construct is turned into a historical reality through the inculcation of schemata of perception and their deployment to draw, enforce, or contest social boundaries. The article traces the impetus behind the key conceptual shifts Bourdieu effects, from class structure to social space, from class consciousness to habitus, from ideology to symbolic violence, and from ruling class to field of power. It also points to recent studies that have tried, tested, and refined the core tenets of his model and it offers a bibliography of Bourdieu’s publications on class documenting a twofold empirical and analytic shift towards a sociology of the realization of categories that spotlights the constitutive power of symbolic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The primary goal of this article is to uncover the deep-seated conceptual affinities between Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. The second goal is to demonstrate that, in part because of their diverging sensitivities, when taken together the two authors’ highly compatible approaches yield a vision more fertile than either of their sociological perspectives considered separately. Tracing the intellectual roots of the two author’s three core concepts – habitus, field/figuration, and power/capital – we show how they selectively appropriated from their predecessors. We then outline how each of the two authors used their overlapping triadic approaches to interrogate a range of empirical phenomena. Attempting to make the authors’ unexploited complementarity more tangible, we reflect on a simultaneously Elias- and Bourdieu-inspired approach to the body-centred world of sport. The conclusion argues that looking back at Elias and Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions together can revitalize our conceptualizing and investigating of human societies in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to make a case and set the foundations for retrieving Erich Fromm’s Freudo-Marxist theory of action and his approach to social domination in particular. To this end, Frommian psychoanalysis is compared with the ‘socio-analysis’ of Pierre Bourdieu. As far as method is concerned, whereas Bourdieu focuses attention on the socio-political processes of production and reproduction of the perceptive structures that individuals and groups employ in their judgements and actions, Fromm fruitfully extends wider to include the links between perceptive and socio-political structures, on the one hand, and the innate structures of the human psyche, on the other hand. Substantively, moreover, Bourdieu tends to exclude physically violent forms of domination from his account of the material effects of symbolic constructs, whilst Fromm consistently places them centre stage. Indeed, Fromm’s analytic operations and foci combine to offer a firm rebuttal to Bourdieu’s curiously ahistorical contention that psychoanalysis concerns itself exclusively with the individual and always in line with some version of psychologistic determinism, thereby serving as an apologia for the abuses subjects suffer under the established order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]