Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology (2018)

Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Oxford Handbooks Online Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology George Steinmetz The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu Edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz Print Publication Date: Apr 2018 Subject: Sociology, Social Theory Online Publication Date: Apr 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357192.013.28 Abstract and Keywords Chapter abstract This chapter explores some of the ways Bourdieusian theory is reinvigorating historical sociology. The first section reconstructs Bourdieu’s increasingly serious engagement over the course of his career with historians and historical material. It argues that Bourdieu generated and encouraged among his students a unique approach to historical sociology. The second section argues that the historical turn in Bourdieu’s work is firmly grounded in the fundamentally historicity of his two key theoretical concepts, habitus and field. The third section sketches an agenda for future work in historical sociology based on Bourdieu’s mature theory. The final section surveys recent social research using Bourdieusian field theory, arguing that this constitutes an unacknowledged and growing tendency within historical sociology. Keywords: Chapter, Bourdieu, history, sociology, field theory, field, habitus History is indispensable to sociologists. —Bourdieu (1998a: 43) These two disciplines [history and sociology] are almost impossible to separate in practice. —René Gouellain1 THIS chapter explores some of the ways Bourdieusian theory is reinvigorating historical sociology. The first section reconstructs Bourdieu’s increasingly serious engagement over the course of his career with historians and historical material. I argue that Bourdieu generated and encouraged among his students a unique approach to historical sociology. In the second section I argue that the historical turn in Bourdieu’s work is firmly Page 1 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology grounded in the fundamentally historicity of his two key theoretical concepts, habitus and field. The third section sketches an agenda for future work in historical sociology based on Bourdieu’s mature theory. In the final section I will survey recent social research using Bourdieusian field theory, arguing that this constitutes an unacknowledged and growing tendency within historical sociology. Bourdieu, Historians, and Historical Sociology We might begin by asking how Bourdieu became sensitized to the role of historicity in social science, given the ahistoricity of most of the leading French sociologists (p. 602) during his lifetime. The work of Alain Touraine, Michel Crozier, and Raymond Boudon, patrons of three of the contending sociological schools (Heilbron 2015), was largely ahistorical. The main exception was Raymond Aron, who advocated a version of the historicist sociology to which he had been exposed in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic, and which he had discussed in his first book (Aron 1935, 1938).2 While these interests were far from unusual within the German-obsessed French philosophy field, they gave Aron a unique profile within French sociology. After his split in 1968 with Bourdieu, Aron created a new center, the Centre Européen de Sociologie Historique. This conjuncture cemented a lasting association between the phase “sociologie historique” and the Aronian school, which seems to explain Bourdieu’s hesitation to adopt the language of historical sociology, at least in the years following the split. During the first half of the 1960s, however, Aron played a central formative role in Bourdieu’s career, and to some extent in his thinking, as discussed in the following.3 Aron was also an early supporter of Eric de Dampierre, whom he involved in launching the Archives européenes de sociologie/European Journal of Sociology in 1960, which was explicitly modeled on Max Weber’s Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Aron also included de Dampierre in his planning for a “Centre européen de sociologie” in 1959–1960.4 This was the project from which the Centre de Sociologie Européenne emerged in 1961—the Center that was directed by Aron and Bourdieu and that no longer included de Dampierre.5 Bourdieu seems to have supplanted de Dampierre as Aron’s young protégé in 1961. Bourdieu and Dampierre completely ignored each other in their subsequent publications. This was another missed connection for Bourdieu, since de Dampierre pioneered an innovative form of historical sociology based on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research (de Dampierre 1967). Daniel Bell praised de Dampierre as “the cultural eminence of French social science” for his publication of French translations of “such varied figures as Leo Strauss and Max Weber”—not to mention E. Franklin Frazier, whose Black Bourgeoisie, a key early work of American historical sociology, was first published in French by de Dampierre in 1955 (Bell 1998: xi n2; Frazier 1955). Page 2 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology In addition to Aron and de Dampierre, there was a group of historically oriented sociologists around Georges Balandier, director of the Centre d’Études Africaines at the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études starting in 1958. Balandier promoted an approach he called “dynamic sociology,” which was diametrically opposed to Levi-Straussian structuralism, focusing instead on the historicity of African and colonized societies (Giordano 2004; Balandier 2010; Steinmetz 2017a). Balandier’s students included Pierre-Philippe Rey and Emmanuel Terray, who combined Africanist fieldwork, historical research, and Althusserian structuralist Marxism. This Africanist work was also ignored by the rest of the sociological field after the mid-1960s, including Bourdieu (although Bourdieu had referred to Balandier’s influential essay on the “colonial situation” in his first book, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958).6 (p. 603) Sources of Historicism in Bourdieu’s Work Given these missed connections to the more historical of the French sociologists, what were the sources of Bourdieu’s emerging historical orientation? The first source was a group of philosophy teachers at the postwar École Normale Supérieure, where Bourdieu received his training in philosophy. The records of Bourdieu’s inscription at the École Normale Supérieure in 1951 indicate that his choice for the principal agrégation degree was in Spanish, with his second choice in “Letters” (Akmut 2011: 324). Two years later, Bourdieu defended his thesis, which was a critical translation of Leibniz’s Animadversiones [Remarks] on the General Part of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (Bourdieu and Delsaut 2002: 192). If this does not yet seem to have much to do with a historical approach, it is important to note that Bourdieu also took courses with a distinctive group of philosophers: Alexandre Koyré in the history of science, and Gaston Bachelard, Éric Weil, and George Canguilhem in the history of philosophy (Pérez 2015: 59). After passing his agrégation in 1954, Bourdieu began working with Canguilhem on a doctoral thesis (Bourdieu 1997). The working title of Bourdieu’s doctoral thesis, reported by Canguilhem in 1957, was “Emotions as Temporal Structure: Interpretation of Physiological Facts” (“L’émotion comme structure temporelle: essai d’interprétation des données physiologiques”; Pérez 2015: 82). Bourdieu later recalled that his doctoral thesis was concerned with phenomenology and “the sociology of emotions” (Bourdieu 2004: 83– 84). The early period of Bourdieu’s scholarly formation thus reveals two historical interests: the history of philosophy and the analysis of temporal subjectivity. Between 1958 and the early 1960s, Bourdieu published a series of sociological studies of contemporary Algerian problems. Bourdieu’s habitus concept emerged in a preliminary, rough-cast form in this Algerian work. The discussion of the temporal structures of Kabyle life in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and Logic of Practice (1990b) connect Bourdieu’s habitus concept to his earlier interest in “emotions as temporal structures.” Bourdieu’s Algerian work also contains the idea of a historical gap or disjuncture between objective and subjective structures. Sociologie de l’Algérie also shows a rudimentary Page 3 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology interest in the historical past of colonized Algerian populations. Bourdieu constructs sociological portraits of four Algerian populations as a methodological baseline against which Algerian responses to colonial capitalism and warfare are explained (Steinmetz 2009c). In 1961 Bourdieu accepted an invitation by Raymond Aron to join the Centre de Sociologie Européenne and to become his teaching assistant at the Sorbonne. Bourdieu’s work at this time had already evolved away from his earlier interests, and he shifted from Canguilhem to Aron as his thesis advisor. Aron was uniquely positioned to inject a historicist sensibility into the work of his famous protégé, who was considered as an “Aronian” by many of his contemporaries, at least until their famous split in 1968 (Joly (p. 604) 2015).7 The revised title of Bourdieu’s never completed doctoral thesis was “Contacts de civilisation en Algérie,” and the subtitle was explicitly Aronian: “Les rapports entre la sociologie et l’histoire” (“the relations between sociology and history”).8 While Aron may have been one of the first to alert Bourdieu to German traditions of historicist sociology, Bourdieu was also immersed in the specifically French traditions of unifying history and sociology. Durkheim had argued that sociology and history were destined to “merge into a common discipline,”9 and that “there is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character” (Durkheim 1982 [1908]: 211). Durkheim’s original team (Besnard 1983) included Louis Gernet, a historian of ancient Greece, Henri Hubert, historian of the Celts and Germanic peoples, and the Chinese historian Marcel Granet. Durkheim developed close ties with historian and philosopher Henri Berr, founder of Revue de synthèse historique, a journal dedicated to the synthesis of history and the social sciences. Historians also promoted the rapprochement of the two disciplines. The creators of the famous history journal Annales, historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, invited the Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs onto their editorial board. Sociology and history were brought back into close proximity after World War II in the context of the revived Durkheimian journal L’Année sociologique, which was directed by Gernet from 1947 until 1961. Another important postwar French sociologist, Georges Gurvitch, included in his field-defining Traité de sociologie (1958) an essay by the leading Annales historian Fernand Braudel calling for a unification of history and sociology. In the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where all influential French sociologists have taught since the 1950s, a number of seminars were entitled “ ‘Histoire et sociologie’ of this or that area” (Hexter 1972: 490–491). As one historian remarks, “France is . . . perhaps the only place where social sciences are institutionally organized around [the] discipline” of history (Lepetit 1996: 31). Whereas the numerically superior group of “modernizing” sociologists in the postwar French discipline rejected the Durkheimian legacy that Bourdieu was aligning himself with (e.g., Jean Stoetzel), the field’s opposing “intellectual” pole maintained continuity with the Durkheimian and pre-1933 sociological traditions.10 Aron’s “European” orientation was signaled in the title of the new journal he founded at the same time, Archives européennes de sociologie. As the journal’s publicity explained, the title was meant to Page 4 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology evoke the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, with which Max Weber had been associated. Despite these factors pushing Bourdieu toward historicism, his work during his first few years at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne were also marked by the prominence of Levi-Straussian structuralism, which was understood as anti-historical. Bourdieu was attracted briefly by “blissful structuralism” (Bourdieu 1990c: 9), although he soon escaped its grasp. His studies of Kabyle kinship practices broke decisively with structuralism, but his studies of education, banks, museums, and photography during the 1960s did not construct their objects historically or “genetically.” The critique of Bourdieu as a “reproduction” theorist focuses on his work from this period, especially The Inheritors (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964), and ignores his work from the late 1960s on, as if studies of Marx’s thought would only read as the “young Marx.” Many of these early works by Bourdieu are written in what I call the “sociological present tense”11—they are marked by an insistence on the immediate here and now. The most important aspects of this period from the standpoint of the long-term development of Bourdieu’s theory and the increasing historicism of his research and conceptual apparatus are his turn from structuralism to a theory of practice and his elaboration of the concepts habitus and field. Bourdieu had already started putting together his field concept in the late 1950s by reading Kurt Lewin.12 Bourdieu’s 1965– 1966 paper “Intellectual Field and Creative Project” staked out a basic argument that would frame all of his subsequent field analyses as historical studies: (p. 605) To recall that the intellectual field as an autonomous system . . . is the result of a historical process of autonomization and internal differentiation . . . means . . . demonstrating that since it is the product of history this system cannot be dissociated from the historical and social conditions under which it was established and, thereby, condemning any attempt to consider propositions arising from a synchronic study of a state of the field as essential, transhistoric and transcultural truths. (Bourdieu 1969 [1966]: 95) This idea of investigating the genesis of fields in order to denaturalize present-day structures was antithetical to both the positivist presentism of Stoetzel et al. and to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. Around the same time, in his Postface to the French edition of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Bourdieu presented his first complete definition of habitus. Paraphrasing Panofsky, Bourdieu wrote that habitus refers to a whole body of fundamental schemes, assimilated beforehand, that generate, according to an art of invention similar to that of musical writing, an infinite number of particular schemes, directly applied to particular situations. This habitus could be defined, by analogy with Noam Chomsky’s “generative grammar,” as a system of internalized schemes that have the capacity to generate Page 5 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology all the thoughts, perceptions, and actions characteristic of a culture, and nothing else. . . . It is therefore natural that one could observe, in domains that are worlds apart at the phenomenal level, the expression of this general tendency. (Bourdieu [1967] 2005: 233) It is significant that the first example of habitus discussed by Bourdieu in detail is a medieval one. Bourdieu had discussed “habits,” “beliefs,” and “cultural mentalities” in his early work on Algeria, but this did not yet take the form of his mature concept of habitus, which I will discuss in the next section. Field Theory and Historical Sociology in Bourdieu’s Work since the 1970s Bourdieu’s field-analytic production shifted into high gear starting around 1970, and this work was marked by an increasingly historical sensibility and greater use of historical material. In addition to his focus on genesis explanations and historical materials, Bourdieu explicitly emphasized change as well as stasis. This shift was (p. 606) signaled by his presentation at the Seventh World Congress of Sociology in 1970, entitled “Facteurs de changement et forces d’inertie” (see also Bourdieu 1966).13 In 1971 Bourdieu published papers on the field of power and the intellectual field (1971a) and two path-breaking articles on the religious field (1971b, 1971c). Significantly, these two essays were organized around a reading of Max Weber, the key progenitor of historicist historical sociology. In 1973 Bourdieu wrote a paper entitled “Gustave Flaubert et Frédéric: Essai sur la genèse sociale de l’intellectuel” (Bourdieu 1973). Flaubert would figure as Bourdieu’s guide to understanding the genesis of the literary field, and Bourdieu’s discussion of Frédéric, the central character in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, was the final nail in the coffin of any critique of Bourdieu as a simple reproduction theorist—Frédéric was a non-inheritor, a figure who refuses his inheritance (Bourdieu 1996). In 1975 Bourdieu published his first historical field analysis, a study of Heidegger’s revolution in German philosophy and of the homological transformation of political relations and positions into philosophical ones (Bourdieu 1975). Bourdieu devoted more and more time to historical studies, culminating in The Rules of Art (1996), Homo Academicus (1988), and the State Nobility (1994), as well as his lecture courses on the state and state formation (2015) and the field of art (2013). Bourdieu invited historians to join the editorial committee of the journal he created in 1975, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Actes became “a venue for historiographic debate,” publishing “at least 70 articles between 1975 and 1993 by historians who were often well-known and for whom the journal was thus neither a form of scientific exile nor a last resort” (Christin 2006: 148). The first volume of Actes carried an article by historian Christophe Charle (1975). The lead article in June 1977, by Page 6 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Sinologist Jean François Billeter, used the phrase “Sociologie historique” in its title (Billeter 1977). Historians started paying more attention to Bourdieu. The work of the “fourth generation” of the Annales school of historiography was “affected . . . pervasively” by Bourdieu (Burke 1990: 80). Even if “there is no such thing as a self-conscious ‘school’ of Bourdieusian history” in France (Vincent 2004: 137), a number of historians drew on his work, including Chartier, Charle, Olivier Christin, Claude Gauvard, Romain Bertrand, and Gerard Noiriel. Bourdieu was involved in exchanges with historians Braudel, Jean Boutier, Robert Darnton, Georges Duby, Patrick Fridenson, Max Gallo, Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Lutz Niethammer, and Lutz Raphael. Historians Chartier and Erik Hobsbawm hailed Bourdieu as one of their own.14 Historians Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (1995) included Bourdieu in their widely read survey of French historical writing. Bourdieu is one of just 10 sociologists included in the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (Boyd 1999). Historians’ interest in Bourdieu is not sufficient proof, however, that his work is historical. After all, some German social historians, led by Hans Ulrich Wehler, had adopted an extremely unhistorical version of social theory—modernization theory—in the 1960s and 1970s (Wehler 1975). The next section will try to demonstrate that Bourdieu’s central concepts are in fact deeply historical. (p. 607) Habitus and Field as Historicist Concepts In this section I will focus on Bourdieu’s central concepts of habitus and field and argue that they introduce a fundamentally historical temporality into the theory of the social actor and her relations to her environment. Bourdieu’s core concepts are inherently historical in three specific senses. First, his concepts designate practices that exist in a specific time and place and are not assumed to be omni-historical or universal. Second, historicity is central to the definition of these practical analytical objects. On the one hand, habitus is defined as incorporated history; on the other hand, fields and their dominant structures are defined as history turned into ostensibly timeless structures. Third, Bourdieu deploys his basic categories in ways that suggest an inherently historicist social epistemology that is open to conjuncture, contingency, and radical discontinuity. At the level of the person, habitus allows for adjustments and improvisations that are far from automatic. At the level of the field, we see that they are typically riven by internal conflicts with unforeseeable outcomes. Once we move from the level of a single field and explore its relations with other fields and with the overarching field of power and social space, it becomes clear that Bourdieusian social research is inherently associated with the possibility, even the likelihood, of both incremental and more momentous and discontinuous forms of social change. Page 7 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Habitus Habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation. nor is it necessarily coherent. —Bourdieu (2000: 160)15 At the core of Bourdieusian social ontology is the circuit running from social structures to habitus, from habitus to practice, and back again. Critics of Bourdieu as a “reproduction theorist” insist that for him, habitus is always objectively synchronized with the social structures that produce it. Bourdieu thereby allegedly robs the actor of agency and reflexivity (e.g., Cronin 1996) and presents a closed circuit of endless repetition, a “vicious cycle of structure producing habitus which reproduces structure ad infinitum” (Bourdieu 2002: 30). Bourdieu vehemently rejected this interpretation of his work as “a product of commentators” that is “constantly repeated . . . as if they spent more time reading the previous exegeses” than his writing (2002: 30). Just as we need to break with spontaneous sociologies and framings of social problems in order to construct them as sociological problems (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1991), so we need to break with these widespread misreadings in order to understand what Bourdieu actually said. Bourdieu did indeed argue that habitus is a product of social conditions and that it may be adjusted to the structures that produce it, even if “that is not very common” (2002: 30). Nonetheless, one of the most basic features of habitus—as opposed to the idea of mere habit—is that it is “never a mere principle of repetition” (2002: 30). Habitus is not a “static concept, intrinsically doomed to express continuities and to repetition, suited to social analysis in relatively stable societies and stationary situations, and only that,” but a concept that can be used “to understand and explain situations of rapid change and to account for social transformation and for the tremendous changes we observe in contemporary societies” (Bourdieu 2002: 27). Bourdieu tried to capture the combination of freedom and constraint with the formula of “regulated improvisation” or “improvisation within defined limits” (Bourdieu 2002: 18; Sapiro 2004). As Bourdieu explained in his lectures on the state, he tried to integrate structuralism with “the fact that the human agent is creative, generative, producing mythical representations by applying mental functions, symbolic forms” (2015: 170). Bourdieu warned repeatedly against modeling social practice on rule-following and against reducing social agents to mere “Träger, ‘bearers’ of the structures” (1991: 252). Habitus for Bourdieu does not result automatically from the subject’s passive imitation of his social environment, but is generated through selective identification with parts of that Umwelt. This confers on agents a social knowledge that is practical and unconscious and that allows them to position themselves in social space and to respond to novel situations, rather than simply applying a template of rules (Mead 2013). (p. 608) The central contribution of this theory of habitus is often summarized as a theoretical shift “from rules to strategies” (Bourdieu 1990a), from structuralism to a pragmatics of action. Strategies are never fully inscribed in the habitus or in the logic of the situation, but emerge through processes of adjustment that are located neither entirely within Page 8 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology conscious decision nor entirely in the unconscious. Bourdieu followed Austin (1975: 16) in calling attention to “misfires” or instances in which an attempted speech act (or by extension, an attempted practice of any sort) fails, due to some mismatch between current conditions and the conditions in which dispositions “were constructed and assembled” (2002: 31). Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis of habitus points to the ways in which habitus may outlive the conditions of its genesis, becoming misaligned with the demands of the current situation (Bourdieu 2000: 159). Bourdieu first used the word habitus in his early writing on Algeria (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964: 87), in an effort to understand precisely the opposite of social stability, namely, the lack of correspondence between Algerian peasants’ economic dispositions and the rapidly changing conditions of late colonial rule (Bourdieu 1979: viii). Similarly, Bourdieu’s early work on the crisis of masculine marriageability in rural Béarn (Bourdieu 2008) was organized around a failure of social reproduction. In addition to these collective mismatches, Bourdieu analyzed individual-level misfires and deviant trajectories. Such clashes between habitus and external conditions are “one of the most important factors in the transformation of the field of power” (1995: 184). Bourdieu also called attention to the fact that “in rapidly changing societies, habitus changes constantly, continuously, within the limits inherent in its original structure” (p. 609) (2002: 31), and pointed to the possibility of deliberately retraining habitus. Indeed, one of the goals of social science, in his view, was to allow people to understand and seize control of their own conditions of existence. One means of gaining control would involve reshaping the habitus through “repeated exercises . . . like an athletic training” (2000: 172). The habitus, Bourdieu argued (2002: 29), “is not something natural, inborn: being a product of history, that is of social experience and education, it may be changed by history, that is by new experiences, education or training (which implies that aspects of what remains unconscious in habitus be made at least partially conscious and explicit).” By emphasizing the objectivity of the possibilities confronting an actor at any given moment, social science can steer us away from quixotic adventures that are likely to fail. “All progress in knowledge of necessity is a progress in possible freedom” (Bourdieu 1993a: 25). At the same time, Bourdieu reproached those “who excessively invoke freedom, the subject, the person, etc., [as] locking social agents into an illusion of freedom, which is one of the ways in which [social] determinism exerts itself” (Bourdieu and Charter 2010: 40). Bourdieu also argued that habituses are sometimes the result of socially heterogeneous situations and are therefore internally divided or “cleft.” He spoke of a “destabilized habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division” (Bourdieu 2000: 160; my emphasis). Theorists from Freud and Weber onward have recognized that human subjectivity is never as unified and coherent as in reductionist models of human nature such as homo economicus or the Hobbesian and Rousseauian visions of man as inherently evil or good. For Weber, human subjectivity was divided into several distinct forms of value orientations modern European subjects were inscribed like palimpsests with habits and ideas originating in bygone historical conditions that had become inaccessible to them. Freud introduced an even more profound schism into the human subject by pitting the Page 9 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology unconscious against conscious thought. Human subjectivity for Freud was riddled with ambivalence, mutually incompatible identifications, contradictory motivations, and overdetermined perceptions and actions. He compared the unconscious to a “mystic writing pad” (Freud 1940 [1925]) whose narrative is nonlinear and shifting. Psychoanalysis is not just fully compatible with Bourdieu’s theory of the subject, as Bourdieu sometimes suggested, but should be able to complete it and push it in new directions (Steinmetz 2014). The central point in the present context is that an unstable, pluralistic, or internally divided habitus cannot possibly be the source of easily predictable or socially reproductive practices. Bourdieu also repeatedly analyzed the way in which two people with identical social backgrounds and similar habituses often respond very differently, even within the same specialized field of activity and at the same historical moment. Flaubert’s depiction in his 1869 novel Sentimental Education of the differing trajectories of a group of young bourgeois men thrown into Parisian society in the 1830s guided Bourdieu’s analysis in The Rules of Art (1996) of the formation and logic of the semi-autonomous literary field. Just as Freud argues that no two people will respond identically to the Oedipus drama, Flaubert suggests that the question of whether an heir will be “disposed to inherit or not” or “to simply maintain the inheritance or to augment it” (Bourdieu 1996: 10) cannot (p. 610) be answered by reference to a shared structural property such as social class background. Analysis of every individual will have to consider, inter alia, the “relation to the father and the mother.” According to Bourdieu, the ambivalence felt by Frédéric (the protagonist in Flaubert’s novel) with respect to his inheritance “may find its principle in his ambivalence towards his mother, a double personage, obviously feminine, but also masculine in that she substitutes for the disappeared father.” Frédéric’s participation in the dual universes of art and money offers him an experience of social weightlessness, a “deferral, for a time, of determinations” (Bourdieu 1996: 19). Like his fictional creation Frédéric, Flaubert tried “to keep himself in that indeterminate position, that neutral place where one can soar above groups and their conflicts” (Bourdieu 1996: 26)—refusing the opposing alternatives that already existed in the literary field and forging an entirely new position for himself. Of course Flaubert’s success in this regard was predicated on his immense inheritance of cultural and economic resources. The point is that the actions of Frédéric or Flaubert are never fully determined by habitus, holdings of capital, or the array of objective possibilities existing in a given field at a given moment. A further refutation of readings of Bourdieu as linear determinist is suggested by Bourdieu’s comments on Frédéric’s ambivalence toward his mother. Bourdieu speaks of “investments” in “identifications” in Homo Academicus (1988: 172) and elsewhere. In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu refers to individual differences in the ability to form an integrated habitus. An over-accommodating personality, he suggests, may form a “rigid, self-enclosed, overintegrated habitus,” while an opportunist or adaptive personality type might allow the habitus to dissolve “into a kind of mens momentanea, incapable of . . . having an integrated sense of self” (2000: 161). Although social aging might partly Page 10 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology explain the transition from adaptive to rigid habitus, neither age nor class is the only mechanism at work. The irreducibly psychic level in Bourdieu’s analysis is also signaled by his increasing tendency to substitute “socioanalysis” for “sociology”. We can now dismantle another pillar in the case against Bourdieu as a non-historical reductionist, which is the claim that his view of human nature uniformly emphasizes the conflictual, agonist side of human practice and subjectivity. This critique stems in part from symbolic oppositions existing in the world outside science, from the system of states to the pseudo-scientific debates over “nature and nurture.” This dichotomy has been codified within sociology as the division, beloved of textbooks and undergraduate lectures, between conflict and consensus theories (Bourdieu 1990a: 41). But nowhere does Bourdieu suggest that a social field could be based exclusively on conflict and competition. He argues that the participants in a social field share a similar illusio, a common libidinal investment in the game itself. Educational institutions operate as both pleasure principle and reality principle, stimulating both the libido sciendi and the libido dominandi, “which is fueled by competition” (1988: 144). Participants in any field depend upon one other for reciprocal recognition of their holdings of symbolic capital and the ranked distinction of their practices and perceptions. Fields are based as much on recognition of and identification with others as on friend–enemy constellations. Indeed, Bourdieu suggests that the family itself is an elementary field. Like other semiautonomous fields, the family is characterized by “mutual recognition, exchange (p. 611) of justifications for existing and reasons for being, mutual testimony of trust,” as well as conflict (Bourdieu 1998b: 112). The family is both a battlefield and a “loving dyad.” By acknowledging the complexity of identifications and motivations guiding actors in any field of endeavor, Bourdieu distances himself decisively from any reductionist shortcut leading from habitus to behavior. How does this relate to the question of the historical or ahistorical character of Bourdieu’s categories? Historical change may be explicable after the fact, but it becomes less predictable as soon as we admit that the theory includes habituses that are internally split and plural rather than singular and unified, that there are improvisations as well as regulation, mismatches as well as objective alignments between habitus and field, disinclinations as well as inclinations to inherit, and that the desire for recognition, trust, and love exist alongside the will to power. Openness to radical rupture, accident, and conjunctural contingency is a hallmark of the most historical and most ontologically adequate versions of sociology, and Bourdieu’s approach is oriented in this direction. The inherently historical character of habitus is also revealed by the fact that it does not achieve a final form once and for all, but is constantly being remade over the course of a lifetime. One reason for this malleability of habitus is that fields are constantly changing and that people typically participate in more than a single field. It is to this second key concept, the concept of the social field, that I now turn. Page 11 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Social Fields Bourdieu’s mature field theory is the place where “historians’ problematics become inextricably mixed with those of sociology” (Chartier in Bourdieu and Chartier 2010: 84– 85). Fields, as defined by Bourdieu, do not exist everywhere and in all historical periods. In order for fields in Bourdieu’s sense to exist, a society needs to have an institutionalized concentration of power in the form of a state or organized dominant social classes. Only then will those involved in other sorts of practice, for example artistic or intellectual activities, tend to seek autonomy from centers of power. “Undifferentiated” societies, according to Bourdieu (1988: 174), do not have fields in this sense; the pre-condition for autonomy is “substantial accumulated capital” that can be redirected to arenas that are not governed by the pursuit of short-term or general profits (Bourdieu 1998c: 71). Historians have debated whether the Académie Française “at the moment of its creation” in the seventeenth century already “represented an early version of a field with some autonomy from power” (Chartier 2002: 83), or whether a semi-autonomous cultural field only emerged in France in the nineteenth century. These questions can only be answered on the basis of a historical reconstruction of the power structures of a given society. Bourdieu’s field theory is also historical in that it urges the analyst to reconstruct the historical genesis of partially autonomous realms of activity, starting with the nomothets, or field founders. A field is historical insofar as it creates a separate universe that did not (p. 612) exist previously. Establishing the very existence of a field may therefore require a return to its origins. The nomothetes may be responsible for certain lasting constraints within a field.16 Established fields are inherently mutable and therefore “historical” in other senses. For any form of practice to be called a field (or field-like), the participants must agree about the stakes of competition, the form of symbolic capital that is peculiar to the field, and jointly exercise some control over access to the field. This foundation of basic agreement underpins all subsequent acts of disagreement, and it is a necessary pre-condition for any domain to attain partial autonomy from its environment. If there is no consensus of this basic sort governing a given realm, it should not be classified as a field. But even where there is basic agreement of this sort, a field may be riven by violent struggles to impose the “dominant principle of domination,” that is, to define the relative ranking of different performances and perceptions. The most dynamic fields such as art (Bourdieu 2013) and fashion (Bourdieu 1993b) are prone to continuous small or “specific” revolutions in this sense. There is a constant churning and cycling of dominant and dominated groups, with newcomers challenging and sometimes overturning hegemonic taste and the status of consecrated elites. We might call this permanent specific revolution (with apologies to Trotsky). Permanent specific revolution defines fields that are constitutionally unsettled. The outcomes of such conflicts cannot be forecasted in advance. The forms of symbolic capital prevailing within a field are always relatively distinct from the kinds of generic Page 12 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology cultural capital dominant in the surrounding social space. There is no way to predict which groups will succeed in imposing their own definition of distinction—or indeed, whether any group will be able to stabilize the situation in this sense. Even settled fields are inherently mutable. A settled field is one in which all participants agree on the hierarchical ranking of different forms of practice. The dominated tend to develop a “taste for necessity,” a “resignation to the inevitable,” and this can contribute to social stability (Bourdieu 1984: 372). At the same time, there are sources of instability even in these kinds of fields. Dominated individuals and groups may attempt to enter the dominant grouping without changing the doxic definition of distinction. Dominant individuals may fall into the dominated poles of the field. Such processes of upward and downward mobility within a given field lend it a different sort of managed historicity. Fields may also be transformed in more fundamental ways. Although Bourdieu describes the field abstractly as a space of objective positions, this does not mean that the array of positions is static. Individual and collective strategies may create or eliminate entire positions. According to Bourdieu, Flaubert succeeded in creating a new sort of position for himself in the literary field. Along similar lines, Max Weber created a novel position in the German field of social science, one located in an intermediate position between the existing geisteswissenschaftliche and naturwissenschaftliche poles (Steinmetz 2009b). More radical changes involve the destruction of old orders and the creation of entirely new ones. Manet, Bourdieu argues, was able to create the field of modern art by destroying the traditional artistic order altogether in a “symbolic revolution.” Individually, (p. 613) Manet was able to overcome the existing polarities structuring the artistic order due to his split habitus, which combined “the two poles of the field of power: bankers/ bohemia.” As a “hard worker” who was “very professional,” Manet “rejected the bohemian style” while at the same time rejecting the “academic style (his teachers’).” He found himself “confronted with the coalition of populism and academic conservatism―what was revolutionary was identified with the popular, the vulgar, the crude.” Manet “was both bourgeois and a rebel artist . . . a revolutionary aristocrat who never wanted to declare himself a revolutionary . . . a natural revolutionary, against the very order that he belonged to.”17 Of course Manet did not accomplish this singlehandedly: The revolution which Manet initiated, and which created our “modern” eye, would no doubt have remained an isolated venture, destined to be rediscovered retrospectively from a viewpoint shaped by some later revolution, if the objective crisis of the academic apparatus had not allowed it to find within the artistic universe itself the complicity and collaboration of artists, critics, and above all writers, who, since they themselves were in the process of undertaking a similar conversion, were predisposed to perceive, understand and express this process of transformation, and thus to find the means of objectifying it in their discourse and in the institutions. (Bourdieu 2013) Page 13 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology One specific source of dynamism within a field is linked to shifts in the overall balance of power between its autonomous and heteronomous poles. At the limit, a field may be taken over by actors located at the heteronomous pole and thereby lose its autonomy altogether, merging with another field. Fields may also be eliminated from outside or above (see later discussion). By directing our gaze to the level of the overall field of power or social space, where multiple fields coexist, we can perceive fundamental sources of change, both within specific fields and in wider swaths of social space. The relations among fields are not regulated by anything that guarantees their harmonious coexistence. Each field is relatively autonomous from all other fields and is governed by its own internal temporality, pace, and rhythm. But internal changes may be overdetermined by external events. In a study of the fashion field, Bourdieu points out that while “the breaks occurring in different fields are not necessarily synchronized,” nonetheless “the specific revolutions have a certain relationship with external changes (1993b: 134). How, then, can we explain society-wide crises? Bourdieu’s solution is to look for forces that temporarily erode the autonomy of several fields at the same time and bring them into a kind of harmony. He explains the student revolts that took place in France in May 1968 at an abstract level by a “synchronization of crises latent in different fields,” the transformation of a “regional crisis” into “a general crisis, a historical event” (Bourdieu 1988: 173). This occurs when the “acceleration” produced by a regional crisis is able to bring about a “coincidence” of events which, “given the different tempo which each field adopts in its relative autonomy, should normally start or finish in dispersed order or, in other words, succeed each other without necessarily organizing themselves into a unified causal series” (Bourdieu 1988: 173). Another logical possibility, albeit one that (p. 614) Bourdieu does not discuss, is that accidental resonances among two or more semiautonomous fields produce unpredictable and contingent conjunctural effects. Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Renewal of Historical Sociology This section sketches four linked research agendas for historical sociology that flow from the arguments presented thus far. All of them are premised on the basic ontological and epistemological features of Bourdieu’s approach: (1) an ontologically emergentist distinction between surface events and their underlying causes; (2) an ontological distinction between human agents, with their characteristic capacities and characteristics (practice, habitus, agency, etc.) and emergent social structures (fields, social spaces, symbolic capital, etc.); (3) an ontology of open systems (Bhaskar 1975, 1979), which imples that empirical events are not produced by general laws, universal regularities, or Page 14 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology “constant conjunctions,” but are complexly overdetermined by changing constellations of causes; and (4) a Bachelardian historical epistemology. Historical Sociology of the Genesis of Specific Forms of Practice or Specific Social Fields The first approach involves what Bourdieu calls genetic or genesis explanations. Here we are interested in disrupting the putative naturalness of some form of practice existing in the present by tracing it back to its constitution, “putting history in motion again by neutralizing the mechanisms” of dehistoricization (Bourdieu 1998b: viii). This move of disrupting “spontaneous sociologies” is part of Bourdieu’s program of epistemic reflexivity, but it also has obvious political valences. One example of this procedure of unmasking the specific interests served by treating current structures as eternal is Bourdieu’s analysis of masculine domination. Bourdieu calls his investigation a form of anamnesis (following Plato and Freud), an “archaeological history” (echoing Foucault), and a “genetic sociology of the sexual unconscious” (Bourdieu 1998b: 54, 106). A second example is Bourdieu’s work on the state (Bourdieu 1999, 2015), in which he reads the structure of the administrative field as an inscription of previous conflicts among contenders for power. Genesis explanations also face the problem of determining whether a new field has emerged, which means that it will exhibit closure and partial autonomy, a sense of the separateness and distinctive history of the activity in question, and a focus on competition around specific stakes or forms of symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s book The Rules of Art (1996) is perhaps his most thorough historical study along these lines, reconstructing the emergence of the French literary field. (p. 615) Stability and Reproduction of Social Fields Closely connected to explanations of the genesis of fields is the analysis of the paradox of their stability. This is the paradox that “Husserl described under the name of the ‘natural attitude’ or ‘doxic experience’ ” (Bourdieu 1998b: 9). The study of stabilized, doxic, conditions brings us back full circle to Bourdieu’s studies in the 1960s of the educational system as class reproduction, but without any danger of equating the diagnosis of stability with a theoretical bias toward reproduction as the norm. This is also where the idea of the inertia of habitus resurfaces. An example of paradoxical reproduction despite dramatically changing extra-field contexts involves US sociology itself, whose internal hierarchies of social scientific capital have been strongly and strangely resistant to almost all developments in the broader intellectual and scientific cultures and in other national and global fields, especially since the 1950s (Steinmetz 2005, 2010). The paradox of stability has itself been paradoxically absent from recent historical sociology, which has Page 15 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology seemed to assume that only drastic change is a proper object of study. Stasis, Bourdieu suggests, is at least as interesting for historical sociology as transformation. Internal Changes in Fields: “Specific Revolutions” and the Geographic Expansion or Contraction of Fields Calhoun (2013: 84) points out that Bourdieu rejected structuralism’s “refusal of history” and that he also was not, in contrast to Foucault, primarily interested in “deep epistemic ruptures.” Instead, Bourdieu “wrestled with the complexities of partial transformation and partial reproduction.” Bourdieu gives several examples of the study of partial changes. Where newcomers vie for power with established elites without changing the basic structure of positions, he suggests, we can speak of a “specific” revolution. The replacement of old elites with new ones is reminiscent of Pareto’s treatment of the circulation of elites. Fields may also change in terms of volume and other morphological characteristics (Gorski 2013: 328–338), the relative power of their heteronomous and autonomous poles, and the definition of the “dominant principles of domination.” In The State Nobility, Bourdieu compares the field of the grandes écoles in 1967 and 1984–1985, finding that the “overall structure of the distribution of the schools” was very similar in both periods but that there was a specific “set of deformations in the field” related to the symbolic devaluation of the university and intellectual fields as a whole with respect to the journalistic field and economic and political power (1994: 190, 209–214). A different dimension of fields has to do with their geospatial footprint. Nothing in field theory requires an emphasis on the space of the nation-state, even if many sorts of practice configure themselves this way, especially practices that are dominated by the state. But fields also expand internationally (Casanova 2004; Heilbron 1999; Mérand and Pouliot 2008) or along the lines of empires (Steinmetz 2016, 2017). Examples of the latter include the creation of administrative outposts of colonial empires as semi-autonomous (p. 616) colonial states (Steinmetz 2007, 2008) and the extension of metropolitan scientific fields into imperial zones of influence (Steinmetz 2013, 2017a). Conversely, imperial or transnational social fields sometimes shrink back onto national or even smaller territories. This was the case with many colonial science fields following decolonization. Globalization extends some fields while downsizing or eliminating others. Social Fields in Their Wider Contexts: Crisis, Revolution, Loss of Autonomy, and the Death of Fields A fourth focus for historical field research moves beyond a single focal field and explores its relations to other fields, to the field of power, and to the social space as a whole. Crisis and generalized revolution are keywords here. Trans-field crisis (i.e., crises that occur simultaneously in many fields) may be caused by severe economic downturns or political dictatorship. Bourdieu’s diagnosis of the loss of autonomy across a range of different cultural fields in the era of globalized neoliberalism is suggestive of a trans-field crisis Page 16 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology caused by a shift in the field of power toward economic capital (see later discussion). On the other hand, generalized crisis may result from the more contingent synchronization of changes occurring simultaneously within a number of different fields for different reasons. Bourdieu points to this kind of scenario in explaining the generalized crisis of the French Republic in 1968 (Bourdieu 1988: Chapter 5). These sorts of crisis may be defined as revolutionary, but in contrast to older definitions of revolution, it does not necessarily entail destroying the state, replacing the ruling class, or redistributing the means of production. Instead, the result of these sorts of crisis may be the elimination of some fields and the creation of others, and the establishment of new dominant groupings in these fields. In much of his later work Bourdieu explored the widespread loss of autonomy in a variety of contemporary fields “through subjection to external forces” (1998: 57). As Bourdieu reminded his readers, the historical emancipation of the autonomous sectors of cultural fields from “the rule of money and interest” was “not in any sense a linear and teleological development of the Hegelian type.” Indeed, the “progress toward autonomy could be suddenly interrupted” (1998c: 67). In his study of commissions charged with reforming French housing policy in the 1970s, Bourdieu found a basic opposition between, on the one hand, the Ministry of Finance and private banks, and on the other hand, the Ministry of Infrastructures and “all the agencies connected with the development of social housing” (2005: 114). He found that a group of “bureaucratic revolutionaries” ultimately pushed the entire field of housing policy in a more “liberal” (that is, pro-market) direction, which ultimately entailed a loss of autonomy for the housing policy field. Most of Bourdieu’s examples of heteronomization in the present period involve “threats that the new economic order represents to the autonomy of the intellectual ‘creators.’ ” He focuses on the effects of “material and mental dependence on economic powers and market constraints” and on the “discrediting—indeed, the demolition—of the (p. 617) critical intellectual” (Bourdieu and Haacke 1995: 16, 69). Bourdieu’s intervention against television journalism focused on its corrosive effects on the autonomous criteria of evaluation that govern the intellectual, scientific, cultural, and even political fields (1998a). Discussing social science, Bourdieu noted that “an increasingly important part of social science gradually tends to be transformed into applied science which, directly or indirectly, finds itself at the service of extra-scientific functions” (Bourdieu and Haacke 1995: 55). The permeation of universities by the logics of “impact” and “audience ratings” (student evaluations) and corporate administrative models (Ginsburg 2011), the shrinkage of research budgets, and the replacement of public funding sources for pure research by more targeted private, corporate, and military sources pose a massive threat to scientific autonomy. And such autonomy is the pre-condition “for the production and diffusion of the highest human creations”—the pre-condition for genuine artistic and scientific innovation (Bourdieu 1998a: 65). Page 17 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Taken to its extreme, the loss of autonomy culminates in the end of fields.18 Field death has a number of different culprits and takes a number of different forms. Some cases are akin to suicide, or destruction from within. In the case of the political and state fields, we find the opposing examples of elected parliaments abdicating their power to the state (Ermakoff 2008) and parliamentarism eroding the autonomy of the sovereign state, leading to its effective demise (Schmitt 1996; Steinmetz 2014c). In other cases, fields are done in by external forces. Imperial conquest usually involves the violent destruction of preexisting indigenous states. European colonizers usually destroyed local polities and replaced them with colonial states controlled by the conquerors (Steinmetz 2008). In Iraq in 2003, the American invaders disbanded the existing civilian and military administration and replaced it with fields of their own design. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union banned cultural and disciplinary fields like sociology, or removed their autonomy by compelling them to conform to dogma. West German elites retaliated in kind after 1990, eliminating university departments focused on Marxism, as part of a sweeping replacement of elites (Bollinger and Van der Heyden 2002). Finally, cultural fields can suffer a slow death when states or corporations tighten the noose around cultural producers’ necks by demanding useful or “impactful” work. Historical Research using Bourdieusian Field Research in Sociology outside France Accounts of historical sociological research focused only on the United States are unable to see more than a single “wave” of research in the present (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005), whereas a more international or transnational perspective opens up different narratives. For example, a non-positivist historical sociology already flourished in Weimar Germany (Steinmetz 2010, 2017b), but it is overlooked in accounts of historical (p. 618) sociology, even by present-day German sociologists (e.g., Bühl 2003; Schützeichel 2004), whose imagination seems to have been captured by the American domination of international sociology, which is part of the broader US domination of global scientific fields.19 Similarly overlooked by US-centric commentators on historical sociology are the French sociologists working in the spirit of Bourdieu, who have crafted a novel form of historical sociology that differs from both the German and Anglo-American varieties (Steinmetz 2011). French sociologists also overlook the existence of a flourishing historical sociology in their own midst.20 There is a huge collection of works by French sociologists, which, taken together, suggest an agenda for historical sociology that is deeply connected to Bourdieu’s approach and which differs in several basic ways from the leading approaches in “Anglo-American” historical sociology.21 The journals Genèses and Politix, in addition to Actes, have represented interdisciplinary spaces defined by historical research and a strong orientation toward Bourdieu’s categories. The range of Page 18 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology fields covered in this work is enormous, ranging from intellectual, scientific, cultural, and educational practices to law, class formation, and social movements. What has been even less visible is the international and transnational22 emergence of a historical sociology inspired by Bourdieusian field theory outside France. This work stems from the fact that students from European countries have been able to study at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris with Bourdieu and his successors, due to the Erasmus Programme. It has been supported by international and Francophone projects such as the European Commission’s program “European Space of Research in the Social Sciences” (2004–2008) and the project “International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” financed by the European Science Foundation. Sociologists who studied or interacted with Bourdieu have helped educate their colleagues about his work, from Finland (Kauppi 1996) to the United States (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Ringer 1990; Swartz 1997). Even more important, perhaps, is the burgeoning body of historical work by social scientists outside France, coming from a number of different disciplines and organized around Bourdieusian field theory. A brief overview of some of the most innovative work in this area provides a sense of the movement’s breadth and depth: • Angermuller (2015) shows that the emergence of French structuralism in the 1960s was dependent on changes in the overall French academic field and the emergence of interstitial spaces between fields. • Bortoluci (2015) explores the field of architecture in Sao Paolo between 1950 and 1995 and shows how it was shaped not only by internal dynamics but also by its relations to external architectural fields in Rio and abroad. • Büyükokutan (2011) studies the field of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, tracing the different relations of dominated newcomers (the Beats) and dominant poets to politicization during the Vietnam War. • Desan (2016) analyzes the transformation of a group of French socialists into fascists during World War II. He notes that most scholars have focused on the significance of neo-socialism, a dissident current within the French Socialist Party. Some (p. 619) of the more prominent socialists who became Nazi sympathizers came from this current, and the assumption has often been that it was the ideational features of neo-socialist doctrine itself that predisposed them toward a fascist transformation. Desan argues, however, that the political trajectory of the neo-socialists was not an inexorable, linear process, but was punctuated by a series of adjustments to the changing conjuncture of the political field. The neo-socialists iteratively reworked their identities as their position in the political field changed, and they became fascists only when their position in the political field became increasingly aligned with Nazi power during the German Occupation. Page 19 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology • Fligstein and McAdam’s ambitious work (2012) translates Bourdieusian field theory into the terminology and epistemological assumptions of American organizational sociology. As Swartz (2014a: 395) notes, Fligstein and McAdam’s book “is neither exegetical nor critical” of Bourdieu, but is rather a “selective importation of features they find agreeable for their purposes of proposing a mesolevel conceptual framework that stresses change, inter-organizational relations, and cooperation.” Fligstein and McAdam depart from Bourdieu in several key ways, foregrounding cooperation and coordination rather than differentiation and conflict, and focusing on actors’ awareness and purposive goals, in contrast to Bourdieu’s emphasis on unconscious practice motives. Their notion of innate social skills contrasts with Bourdieu’s critical analysis of the ways the distribution of skills can be “skewed by an unequal distribution of cultural or social capital” (Swartz 2014b: 678), and the ways in which the very definition of what counts as skills and which skills are most valuable is socially rather than biologically determined. Unlike Bourdieu, who emphasizes the ways in which “fields can form groups” (Swartz 2014a: 399) and transform individuals, Fligstein and McAdam privilege already constituted groups. Their work is laudable in emphasizing the historical emergence of new fields, the contingent ways in which different fields interact in producing macro-social events and crises, and in connecting Bourdieu’s work to sociologists interested in economics, social movements, and policymaking (see also Bourdieu 2003; Mathieu 2012). • Lei (2014) sets out to explain the reasons that the Chinese state banned the practice of traditional medicine in 1929. In the section that is most directly inspired by Bourdieu, Lei shows how the two groups of scholar-physicians competed in the wake of the Manchurian pneumonic plague of 1910–1911 to monopolize support and sanction from the Chinese state. Lei also analyzes the transformation of traditional Chinese medicine into a “mongrel” science and traces the eventual emergence of two parallel systems of schools and hospitals, Western and traditional. • Medvetz (2012) analyzes think tanks in American political life. He asks how think tanks emerged from struggles within a larger social space and field of power, and he argues that they are defined by their combined dependence on and autonomy from four other fields: the economic, political, university, and media fields. Medvetz shows how the habitus and products of think tank experts mix attributes from these different poles. The complicated task that every think tank expert faces is to signal autonomy to the general public (thereby suggesting a difference from a (p. 620) mere lobby) while simultaneously signaling heteronomy to the restricted public—the clients. • Saruya (2012) examines the fields of intellectuals and students in Japan in relation to the Anpo protests around the first revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 and proposes a field-analytic model of competition among different groups of students. She argues, following Mathieu (2012), that one cannot generally speak of a field of social movements, given the absence of a common metric of symbolic capital across different movements, but that individual movements sometimes take on field-like characteristics Page 20 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology (internal competition over a specific form of symbolic capital, division between more autonomous and heteronomous poles). • In my own work, I have examined the formation of the fields of American, French, and British sociology in the twentieth century (Steinmetz 2005, 2009, 2013, 2017a); the forced emigration of German sociologists to the United States after 1933 and their failure to insert themselves into homologous positions in American social science fields (Steinmetz 2010); and the construction of colonial states as specialized fields organized around competing claims to a specific kind of talent or expertise, which I call ethnographic acuity (Steinmetz 2007, 2008). This short list of works by social scientists in several different disciplines and national settings reveals that Bourdieusian field theory has become a crucial impetus to historical social science, generating ever new lines of inquiry. Bourdieu is the only French sociologist since Durkheim to have burst the national boundaries of France to this extent and to have inspired a global following. But while Bourdieu has secured his place as a classic sociologist, this does not mean that his theoretical, epistemological, and methodological framework is now complete, frozen in place. There is ample room for neoand post-Bourdieusian elaborations, parallel to the many variations on Marx and Weber that have emerged since the deaths of those foundational thinkers. References Adams, Julia, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff. 2005. “Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology.” In Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, edited by Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, pp. 1–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Akmut, Atilla. 2011. Apprentis philosophes des années 1940–1960. Entre beaux-arts et les sciences. Étude précédée et accompagnée d’une histoire sociale des élèves littéraires de l’École normale supérieure (1945–1954) et d’éléments systématiques sur la formation et la trajectoire du sociologue Pierre Bourdieu. Master’s thesis, ENS-EHESS. Angermuller, Johannes. 2015. Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation. London: Bloomsbury. Aron, Raymond. 1935. La Sociologie allemande contemporaine. Paris: Alcan. Aron, Raymond. 1938. Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine: La philosophie critique de l’histoire. Paris: Vrin. Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Balandier, Georges. 2010. “Tout parcours scientifique comporte des moments autobiographiques.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 185 (December), 44–61. Page 21 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Bazenguissa-Ganga, Rémy R. 1997. Les voies du politique au Congo: Essai de sociologie historique. Paris: Karthala Bell, Daniel. 1998. “Preface.” In Dominique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality, pp. vii–xiv. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Besnard, Philippe. 1983. “The ‘Année sociologique’ Team.” The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, edited by Philippe Besnard, pp. 11– 39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, Roy. 1975. A Realist Theory of Science. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press. Bhaskar, Roy. 1979. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Humanities Press. Billeter, Jean-François. 1977. “Contribution à une sociologie historique du mandarinat.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 15(1): 3–29. (p. 623) Blondiaux, Loïc. 1991. “Comment rompre avec Durkheim? Jean Stoetzel et la sociologie française de l'après-guerre (1945-1958).” Revue française de sociologie 32(3) (July– September): 411–441. Bollinger, Stefan, and Ulrich van der Heyden. 2002. “Sovereignty and Sociology: From State Theory to Theories of Empire.” Political Power and Social Theory 28: 269–285. Boltanski, Luc. 1987. The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bortoluci, José. 2015. “Architectures of the People: Material and Cultural Politics of Housing in São Paulo, 1950–1995.” PhD dissertation, Sociology, University of Michigan. Boschetti, Anna. 1988. The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les temps modernes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1958. Sociologie de l’Algérie, 1st edition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1966. Le déchantement du monde: Eléments pour une théorie du changement social. Paris: Centre de Sociologie Européenne Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971a. “Genèse et structure du champ religieux.” Revue française de sociologie 12(3): 295–334. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971b. “Une interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber.” Archives européennes de sociologie 12(1): 3–21. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971c. “Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectuel et habitus de classe.” Scolies: Cahiers de recherches de l’École normale supérieure 1: 7–26. Page 22 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Bourdieu, Pierre. 1973. Gustave Flaubert et Frédéric: Essai sur la genèse sociale de l’intellectuel. Paris: Centre Européenne de Sociologie. Unpublished paper. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975. “L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (5–6): 109–156. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990a. “Landmarks.” In Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, pp. 34–55. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990b. “From Rules to Strategies.” In Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, pp. 59–75. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990c. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Oxford: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991a. “On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology.” In Social Theory for a Changing Society, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman, pp. 373– 387. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993a. “The Sociologist in Question.” In Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, pp. 20–35. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993b. “Haute Couture and Haute Culture.” In Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, pp. 132–138. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. “Sur les rapports entre la sociologie et l’histoire en Allemagne et en France.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 106–107 (March): 108–122. (p. 624) Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. “Défataliser le monde.” Les inrockuptibles 99 (April): 22–29. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998a. On Television. New York: The New Press. Page 23 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998b. Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998c. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. New York: The New Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” In State/Culture, edited by G. Steinmetz, pp. 53–75. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001 [1998]. Masculine Domination. Oxford: Blackwell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. “Habitus.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by Jean Hillier and E. Rooksby, pp. 27–34. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2003. The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. “Entretien de Pierre Bourdieu avec Gisèle Sapiro, le 7 juin 2000.” In Pierre Bourdieu sociologue, edited by Louis Pinto, Gisèle Sapiro, and Patrick Champagne, pp. 79–91. Paris: Fayard. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2005 [1967]. “Postface to Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.” In The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, edited by Bruce W. Holsinger, pp. 221–242. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2007. Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2008. The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2013. Manet: Une révolution symbolique: cours au Collège de France (1998–2000). Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2015 [2012]. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France 1989– 1992. London: Polity Press. 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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology Notes: (1.) René Gouellain, Rapport, Sept. 1971, “Sur l’état de ma thèse en vue du Doctorat d’État,” p. 7, CNRS dossier, CNRS archives (Gif-sur-Yvette, France). (2.) On Weimar sociological historicism, see Mannheim (1952 [1924]; 1932); Steinmetz (2010). (3.) On the split between Aron and Bourdieu in 1968, see Joly (2015). (4.) Letter from de Dampierre to Grémion, October 8, 1995, in Bibliothèque Éric de Dampierre (Nanterre, France), Dampierre papers, FILE 9: MSHO—Correspondants scientifiques E-N; also Dampierre, “Note sur le CENTRE EUROPÉEN DE SOCIOLOGIE” (first version), November 1, 1959, in folder “Centre de sociologie européenne,” C. Heller papers, EHESS archives (Paris). (5.) In the third version of the application to the Ford Foundation for funding, Aron included Bourdieu alongside de Dampierre; folder “Centre de sociologie européenne,” C. Heller papers, EHESS archives (Paris). (6.) Balandier reciprocated this lack of interest (see his comments in Balandier [2010: 56]), although several of his students, including Françine Muel-Dreyfus and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga (1997), worked with Bourdieu’s concepts. (7.) Bourdieu was seen by some of his contemporaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s as being located politically on the “center-right” (“centre droit”) or as being “barely on the left” (“à peine de gauche”); interview by Amin Pérez with Jeanne Favret-Saada, former student of Aron at the Sorbonne who replaced Bourdieu as the instructor in “Morale et sociologie” at the University of Algiers in 1960, in Pérez (2015: 92). Of course these political judgments have to be carefully assessed and placed in their proper historical and national context. (8.) It is also possible, as Joly (2012: 216) muses, that Bourdieu’s subtitle was meant to please Fernand Braudel, director of the Sixth Section, who believed that Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria “took too little account of history” (Bourdieu 2007: 31). (9.) “Préface,” Année sociologique 1, 1896–1897 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1899), iii. (10.) See Blondiaux (1991); Heilbron (2015). (11.) Ontologically, the sociological present tense focuses analytically on the moment of research and writing. Works written in sociological present tense either ignore everything anterior to the moment of analysis or relegate the past to “background” conditions. This epistemological stance became part of the positivist methodological unconscious in postwar US positivist sociology (Steinmetz 2005). It was so well codified that even a Page 31 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology sociological study that drew on historical data could be divided into a present—the moment of the “dependent variable”—and historical “background.” (12.) Letter from Bourdieu to Abdelmalek Sayad, late 1959. In Fonds d’Archives Abdelmalek Sayad (FAAS), Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (MHI), Paris, France. Thanks to Amin Perez for this reference. (13.) This shift from a polemical focus on barriers to class inequality to a focus on margins of freedom within structural constraint—and therefore historical change— corresponds closely to the shift in France and the rest of the advanced capitalist world from Fordist stability to destabilization. The bellwether of this shift in France was the events of May 1968. While Bourdieu is one of the only leading French intellectuals who did not take a public stance for or against the events of May 1968 (Pérez 2015), his analyses of class reproduction were widely discussed during the student revolt. Bourdieu’s increasing politicization and his exploration of ways to deploy social science politically was not unconnected to his increasing historicism. On Bourdieu’s politics, see Poupeau and Discepolo (2002) and Pérez (2015). (14.) On Chartier and Bourdieu, see later discussion. For Hobsbawm’s comment on Bourdieu, see “Eric Hobsbawm on Charles Tilly” (2009), at http://www.ssrc.org/programs/ pages/tilly-fund-for-social-science-history/eric-hobsbawm-on-charles-tilly/. (15.) Translation adjusted by the author of this article. (16.) On the need to analyze the “time zero” of a field, see Alfredo Joignant, “Genèse et structure du champ politique: Éléments de sociologie du temps zéro de l’espace des positions politiques,” paper presented at the conference “Pierre Bourdieu e l’epistemologia del pensiero sociologico,” Rome, October 2015. (17.) These are the author’s translations, created before publication of the official translation of Bourdieu’s text into English. (18.) A very different dynamic leading to the loss of fieldness occurs when a field becomes an apparatus—when “all movements go exclusively from the top down . . . such that the struggle and the dialectic that are constitutive of the field cease” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 102). (19.) Of course there are exceptions, such as Kruse (1998). The different German renderings of the history of historical sociology are linked to different positions within the German sociological field, as might be expected. (20.) A recent overview of French sociological work since 1960 does not contain a chapter or even an index entry for “sociologie historique” (Paradeise, Lorrain, and Demazière 2015). Page 32 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018 Bourdieusian Field Theory and the Reorientation of Historical Sociology (21.) Bazenguissa-Ganga (1997); Boltanski (1987), Boschetti (1988); Brisson (2008); Colonna (1975); Dezalay and Garth (2002); Fabiani (1980); Hauchecorne (2011); Heilbron (1995); Heinich (1981); Henry (2012); Jeanpierre (2004); Karady (1976); Lambert (1982); Lardinois (2007); Lenoir (2003); Mathieu (2012); Muel-Dreyfus (1983); Perez (2015); Pinto (2007); Pollak (1978); Ponton (1977); Popa (2015); Sapiro (2014); Topalov (1994). (22.) Most social science work is still strongly linked to national fields, since most social scientists work for universities or research organizations that are governed and financed by states. Language differences and national theoretical traditions also continue to play a stronger role in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. As a result, it is more realistic to speak of international than transnational processes. George Steinmetz George Steinmetz, University of Michigan Page 33 of 33 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2018