A key feature of those who work for the state, in the legal system and in public services is that they claim to be putting their own personal interests aside and working in a disinterested fashion, for the public good. But is disinterested behaviour possible? Can law be treated as a set of universal rules that are independent of particular interests, or is this mere ideology? Is the state bureaucracy a universal class, as Hegel thought, or a structure that serves the interests of the dominant class, as Marx claimed?
In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1987-88 and 1988-89, Pierre Bourdieu addressed these questions by examining the formation of the legal and bureaucratic fields characteristic of the modern state, uncovering the historical and social conditions that enable a social group to form and find its own interests in the very fact of serving interests that go beyond it. For a disinterested universe to emerge, it needs both the invention of a public service, or a spirit of service to the public cause, and the creation of a social universe in which individuals can pursue a career devoted to public service and be rewarded for it. In other words, it requires a process of specialization whereby autonomous, specific fields become established in the social cosmos within which a special kind of game that follows the rules of disinterest can be played out.
By reconstructing the conditions under which an interest in disinterestedness emerged, Bourdieu sheds new light on the formation of the modern state and legal system and provides a fresh perspective on the many professions in modern societies that are oriented towards the service of the common good.
In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1987-88 and 1988-89, Pierre Bourdieu addressed these questions by examining the formation of the legal and bureaucratic fields characteristic of the modern state, uncovering the historical and social conditions that enable a social group to form and find its own interests in the very fact of serving interests that go beyond it. For a disinterested universe to emerge, it needs both the invention of a public service, or a spirit of service to the public cause, and the creation of a social universe in which individuals can pursue a career devoted to public service and be rewarded for it. In other words, it requires a process of specialization whereby autonomous, specific fields become established in the social cosmos within which a special kind of game that follows the rules of disinterest can be played out.
By reconstructing the conditions under which an interest in disinterestedness emerged, Bourdieu sheds new light on the formation of the modern state and legal system and provides a fresh perspective on the many professions in modern societies that are oriented towards the service of the common good.
Table of Contents
Editor’s noteYear of 1987-1988
March 10 1988
Internal reading, external reading and autonomy - Forgetting the microcosm - The coherence and normativity of the law - The space of works and the space of positions - A canonical text by d’Aguesseau - The invention of the public as a new sovereign.
March 17 1988
Common sense and the feel for the game in a field - The transfiguration of common sense into specialised meanings (sequel) - Producing a love for the game - Two other questions - The double historicization - The Jansenist influence and the problem of self-love - Inventing the public: the oracle effect - Producing the universal with individual interests
March 24 1988
What is a quotation? - The effect of the social sciences on the social world - From interesting conditions to disinterestedness - The principle of sufficient reason and its suspension - Logical logic and practical logics - Conditions creating interest in disinterestedness - Spontaneous submission to the rules of the field - Genesis of the rules of the juridical field - Business law and pure law - Cross-checking - The force of the ideal - Escaping historicism.
Lecture of April 14 1988
The claim to be universal - Does a space beyond positions exist? - Two canonical positions - The organicist metaphor - A quasi-divine viewpoint - Durkheim’s lapses - The reinvention of Hegel’s theory - The State, a movement towards unity - Bureaucracy - Durkheim, State sociologist.
Lecture of April 21 1988
A charitable reading of Marx’s theory of the State - An enchanted vision and a disenchanted vision of the State - The unconscious corporatism of the sociologists - A sociological critique of the social sciences - First false problem: does sociology liberate or manipulate? Second false problem: continuity or break? - Towards a social history of the social sciences - The ‘prehistory of the social sciences’ - The birth of the social sciences in an awkward position - Scientific sociology and France as a special case - The separation of national traditions during the interwar period - The triumphant postwar development
Year of 1988-1989
Lecture of January 19 1989
The essays on the State - Disinterestedness is suspect - An inverted world and its genesis - The ghost of economic reality - Understanding the oblates - Two universal observations.
Lecture of January 26 1989
A plan for an enquiry into the Pechiney affair - A transhistorical sociology of ethical dispositions - The habitus and the Kantian ethic.
Lecture of February 2 1989
The regulated transgression of the bureaucratic rule - Political field and bureaucratic field - The categories of technocratic understanding - The notion of profession, a scholarly myth - The definition of the concept
Lecture of February 9 1989
A sociodicy behind the description of a historical process - The profession, a scholarly myth - Profession, corps and field - The theory of the professions as a negative theory of the State - The school as liberator - Continuity and genesis of the great corps.
Lecture of February 16 1989
The medical profession and the State - Weber and the ‘educational patent’ - Sate magic, certification, magic and the educational universe - The confinement of the dominant - A programme of research - Approaching the State - The time of law - The origins of sociology.
Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State. Situating the Lectures of 1987-1988 and 1988-1989
Julien Duval
Summaries of the Lectures Published in the Annual of the Collège de France
Notes
Index
