On the state : lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992 / Pierre Bourdieu ; edited by Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine Rivière ; translated by David Fernbach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002, author.

Contributor:

Champagne, Patrick, editor.

Lenoir, Rémi, editor.

Fernbach, David, translator.

Standardized Title:

Sur l'État. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Political sociology.

State, The.

Physical Description:

xii, 449 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

English edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2014.

Language Note:

Translated from the French.

Summary:

"What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber's famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The 'collective fiction of the state -- a fiction with very real effects -- is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu's work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows 'another Bourdieu', both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of 'state thought' designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an 'anti-institutional mood' that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination."--Publisher's website.

Contents:

Year 1989+1990

Lecture of 18 January 1990 3

An unthinkable object - The state as a neutral site - The Marxist tradition - The calendar and the structure of temporality - State categories - Acts of state - The private-home market and the state -The Barre commission on housing

Lecture of 25 January 1990 23

The theoretical and the empirical - State commissions and stagings -The social construction of public problems - The state as viewpoint on viewpoints - Official marriage - Theory and theory effects - The two meanings of the word 'state' - Transforming the particular into the universal - The obsequium- Institutions as 'organized fiduciary' -Genesis of the state. Difficulties of the undertaking - Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology - The state and the sociologist

Lecture of 1 February 1990 44

The rhetoric of the official - The public and the official - The universal other and censorship - The legislator as artist' - The genesis of public discourse - Public discourse and the imposition of form - Public opinion

Lecture of 8 February 1990 65

The concentration of symbolic resources - Sociological reading of Franz Kafka - An untenable research programme - History and sociology - Shmuel Eisensfadt's The Political Systems of Empires -Perry Anderson's two books - The problem of the three routes according to Harrington Moore

Lecture of 15 February 1990 84

The official and the private - Sociology and history: genetic structuralism - Genetic history of the state - Game and field-Anachronism and the illusion of the nominal - The two faces of the state

Year 1990-1991

Lecture of 10 January 1991

Historical approach and genetic approach - Research strategy -Housing policy - Interactions and structural relations - Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization - The effect of 'that's the way it is and the closing of possibilities - The space of possibilities-The example of spelling

Lecture of 17 January 1991

Reminder of the course's approach - The two meanings of the word 'state': state as administration, state as territory - The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle -Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias - Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly

Lecture of 24 January 1991 136

Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint - Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer - The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms

Lecture of 31 January 1991 150

Reply to questions - Cultural archaisms and economic-transformations - Culture and national unity: the case of Japan -Bureaucracy and cultural integration - National unification and cultural domination

Lecture of 7 February 1991 162

Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power - Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning - The state as producer of principles of classification - Belief effect and cognitive structures - The coherence effect of state symbolic systems -The school timetable as a state construction - The producers of doxa

Lecture of 14 February 1991 176

Sociology, an esoteric science with an exoteric air - Professionals and lav people - The state structures the social order - Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy - Transmutation of private into public: the appearance of the modern state in Europe

Lecture of 21 February 1991 190

Logic of the genesis and emergence of the state: symbolic capital -The stages of the process of concentration of capital - The dynastic state - The state as a power over powers - Concentration and dispossession of species of capital: the example of physical force capital - Constitution of a central economic capital and construction of an autonomous economic space

Lecture of 7 March 1991 206

Reply to questions: conformity and consensus - Concentration processes of the species of capital: resistances - The unification of the juridical market - The constitution of an interest in the universal -The state viewpoint and totalization: informational capital -Concentration of cultural capital and national construction -'Natural nobility' and state nobility

Lecture of 14 March 1991 220

Digression: an overthrow in the intellectual field-The double face of the state: domination and integration - Jus loci and jus sanguinis - Unification of the market in symbolic goods -Analogy between the religious field and the cultural field

Lecture of 3 October 1991 235

A model of the transformations of the dynastic state - The notion of reproduction strategies - The notion of a system of reproduction strategies - The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies - The 'king's house' - Juridical logic and practical logic of the dynastic state - Objectives of the next lecture

Lecture of 10 October 1991 249

The 'house' model against historical finalism - The stakes in historical research on the state - The contradictions of the dynastic state - A tripartite structure

Lecture of 24 October 1991 264

Recapitulation of the logic of the course - Family reproduction and state reproduction - Digression on the history of political thought -The historical role of jurists in the process of state construction -Differentiation of power and structural corruption: an economic model

Lecture of 7 November 1991 278

Preamble: the pitfalls of communication in social science - The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 1: the ambiguous power of sub-bureaucrats-The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 2: the 'pure' - The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 3: double game and double 'I' - The genesis of the bureaucratic space and the invention of the public

Lecture of 14 November 1991 292

Construction of the republic and construction of the nation -The constitution of the public in the light of an English treatise on constitutional law - The use of royal seals: the chain of warrants

Lecture of 21 November 1991 305

Reply to a question on the publiclprivate contrast - The transmutation of private into public: a non-linear process - The genesis of the meta-field of power: differentiation and dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic authorities - A research programme on the French Revolution - Dynastic principle versus juridical principle as seen through the lit de justice - Methodological digression: the kitchen of political theories - Juridical struggles as symbolic struggles for power - The three contradictions of jurists

Lecture of 28 November 1991 322

History as a stake in struggles - The juridical field: a historical approach - Functions and functionaries - The state as fictio juris -Juridical capital as linguistic capital and mastery of practice - Jurists face the church: a corporation acquires autonomy - Reformation, Jansenism and juridism - The public: a reality without precedent that keeps coming into being

Lecture of 5 December 1991 339

Programme for a social history of political ideas and the state -Interest in disinterestedness - Jurists and the universal - The (false) problem of the French Revolution - The state and the nation - The state as 'civil religion' - Nationality and citizenship: contrast between the French and German models - Struggles between interests and struggles between unconscious forms in political debate

Lecture of 12 December 1991 354

The construction of political space: the parliamentary game -Digression: television in the new political game - From the paper state to the real state - Domesticating the dominated: the dialectic of discipline and philanthropy - The theoretical dimension of state construction - Questions for a conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 411-433) and index.

ISBN:

9780745663296

074566329X

OCLC:

868078587