Instead of asking whether a particular intellectual position is self-interested or disinterested, Bourdieu says we should be asking to what extent it’s shaped by a field in which the ‘rules of the game’ systematically exclude the interference of economic and political power, i.e. to what extent the field is autonomous (for the argument for autonomy, see the postscript of Les règles de l’art). So I think a Bourdieuian argument for the greater validity of a sociological understanding of society, compared to a philosophical one, could rest on the claim that sociology (or at least the type of sociology that Bourdieu advocated and practiced) can be more autonomous than philosophy, because, unlike philosophy, when sociology analyses ideas, it can include in its analysis the social conditions of the production of those ideas, as well as the social conditions of the production of the individuals who formulate and use those ideas. Only this social reflexivity, Bourdieu argues, can enable a sociologist to avoid unconsciously smuggling assumptions that are part of the object of study (e.g. concepts that belong to the taken-for-granted world-view of intellectuals, and thus of the fraction of the dominant class from which intellectuals tend to be recruited) into the study itself.

I’d be very interested to see any evidence that Bourdieu’s sociology has been taken on board at all by anyone who holds political power anywhere. His basic argument was that systems of domination and privilege can function only because they are ‘misrecognised’, ‘euphemised’, disguised as something else (e.g. as the practice of lofty intellectual or ethical principles), and that the role of sociology is to break the spell of this misrecognition by revealing the true mechanisms of domination, thus undermining them.

I think that philosophy’s relative lack of autonomy is precisely what has made it easy for philosophers to become TV personalities in France and to provide a discourse that serves to legitimise the social order, while sociology remains more or less completely excluded from the mainstream media.

Thanks for pointing me to Louis Pinto’s book, it looks interesting.

Thanks for the clarification. Without getting into the details of a global analysis of Sartre which I think neither of us really wants right here, it seems to me that this is one of those cases where one can give a more or less sympathetic reading of Sartre or Bourdieu and accordingly find quotes to support… so we may not be able to arrive here at a very satisfactory consensus reading of Bourdieu’s critique. I note incidentally that Bourdieu doesn’t, from what you’ve quoted, really seem to give much of a reflexive account of the way that his own social position or his own disciplinary “interests” determine his own interpretation of Sartre, so that although he may recognize others’ interests in attacking Sartre, he seems not to do so for himself. But who knows?

About the last issue you raise, the (re)claiming of philosophical issues (which ones?) by sociology, it seems like a pretty complicated question to me. Bourdieu was somewhat influential in 80s policy circles, I heard somewhere. But that may have had less to do with the scientificity of his discipline and more to do with the political resonances of his findings — it’s not politically empty that bourdieuian sociology is called a “sociology of domination.” And philosophy, needless to say, has had no shortage of political influence in France, so scientificity per se definitely doesn’t seem like a necessary condition of political influence in France. But sociology and philosophy have a long and conflictual history in France — Louis Pinto has a new book out about it, actually.

Sans doute opposera-t-on à cette analyse de l’anthropologie sartrienne les textes (fort nombreux, surtout dans les premières et les dernières oeuvres) où Sartre reconnaît par exemple les « synthèses passives » d’un univers de significations déjà constituées . . . Reste qu’il repousse avec une répugnance viscérale « ces réalités gélatineuses et plus ou moins vaguement hantées par une conscience supra-individuelle qu’un organicisme honteux cherche encore à retrouver, contre toute vraisemblance, dans ce champ rude, complexe mais tranché de l’activité passive où il y a des organismes individuels et des réalités matérielles organiques » ; et qu’il ne fait aucune place à tout ce qui, du côté des choses du monde aussi bien que du côté des agents, pourrait brouiller la limite que son dualisme rigoureux entend maintenir entre la transparence pure du sujet et l’opacité minérale de la chose.

Definitely I think that, at a certain time, a lot of French intellectuals had a huge interest in attacking Sartre and distancing themselves from his ideas. Bourdieu said as much in a lecture called Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées. Speaking to an audience in Germany, he said:

Tout le monde ici se demande comment les Français ont pu s’intéresser tellement à Heidegger. En fait, il y a beaucoup, beaucoup de raisons, presque trop… Mais il y a une explication qui saute aux yeux, c’est le fait que, comme l’a montré Anna Boschetti dans son livre sur Sartre et Les Temps modernes, le champ intellectuel des années 1950 était dominé de façon écrasante par Sartre. Et une des fonctions majeures de Heidegger, c’était de servir a disqualifier Sartre (les professeurs disait : « Tout Sartre est dans Heidegger et en mieux »).

Similarly, it’s been in the interest of some French academics more recently to distance themselves from Bourdieu.

I think Bourdieu is right to reclaim for sociology a lot of what philosophy had claimed has its own. If the academic study of society is ever going to be credible enough to influence government policy and the shape of politics, that can only happen if it becomes credible as science, not as philosophy, which, as Richard Rorty argued, can only aspire to be “edifying discourse”.