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Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu's judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology's evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists' ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper's third section asserts that phenomenology's substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the concept of ideology to contemporary sociological analysis. To this end, the article draws upon central arguments put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski in ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The Production of the Dominant Ideology’]. Yet, the important theoretical contributions made in this enquiry have been largely ignored by contemporary sociologists, even by those who specialize in the critical study of ideology. This article intends to fill this gap in the literature by illustrating that useful lessons can be learned from Bourdieu and Boltanski’s critical investigation, as it provides crucial insights into the principal characteristics and functions of ideologies, including the ways in which they develop and operate in advanced capitalist societies. The article is divided into two main parts: the first part examines various universal features of ideology; the second part aims to shed light on several particular features of dominant ideology. The paper concludes by arguing that the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, despite the fact that it raises valuable sociological questions, is ultimately untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of social theory is too often given to celebrity hunting, the polemical vulgarizing of one's putative enemies, or the precocious production of totalizing and redemptive theories purporting to rescue social theory from its perennial crises of meaning, naming and explanation. The constructive task of social theory, however, can be both more modest and productive when attention is given to its substantive concern to provide codes, narratives and explanations of modernity, in all its pluralist and democratic dimensions. This is in effect the self-description of Jeffrey Alexander's own work. This paper provides an empathetic account of Alexander's approach to the practice of social theory via a synopsis of his collected essays in Fin de Siècle Social Theory (1995). In particular, it claims that Alexander's critique of the reductionist propensities of Pierre Bourdieu's macro-sociological theory is exemplary in its constructive cast as a systematic analysis of the universalizing contents of the conceptual and methodological claims themselves. Herein lies the use of reason itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy's recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu's own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master's thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This article responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a 'thicker' conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy's arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]