GOOD AND BAD HABITUS: BOURDIEU, HABERMAS AND THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND.

The article provides information about British politics. The difficult opacities of British politics offered no very obvious purchase point to the theorists. The straightforward and momentous dramas of 1968 transformed things in a few months of that remarkable year: the Pentagon march, the May Events in Paris, the Prague Spring and the invasion in August, all these were taken for wonders, and the smaller scale of British politics found its own bold poster images. This potted history can do no more than to a few loose knots between history and intellect, and mention the contexts in which present cliches so recently began. Structural-functional theories, doubtless started from the relatively stable and self-satisfied expansion of the rich nations after the war, and their no less satisfied investigation of their poorer, traditional and client nations amongst whom they set up their super-shops. Functionalism on the one hand, and abstract empiricism on the other, are no metonymy for anything when structures cave in under the pressure of both processes and people, and when the categories of the data-collectors are too porous to hold any information worth having.