Pierre Bourdieu And Democratic Politics: The Mystery Of Ministry

Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu’s distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation – starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the “mystery of ministry.”

The fruitfulness of Bourdieu’s approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu’s own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society.

Charting the connections between Bourdieu’s political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.

Loic Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie europeenne-Paris.

Contributors.

Introduction: Symbolic Power and Democratic Practice.

1 Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics.

(Loic Wacquant).

2 From the King's House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field.

(Pierre Bourdieu).

3 The Mystery of Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General Will.

(Pierre Bourdieu).

4 Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu.

(Franck Popupeau and Thierry Discepolo).

5 Ancien Regime Ballots: A Double Historicization of Electoral Practices.

(Olivier Christin).

6 Making the People Speak: On the Social Uses of and Reactions to Opinion Polls.

(Patrick Champagne).

7 Symbolic Power in the Rule of the "State Nobility".

(Loic Wacquant).

8 The Making and Breaking of the Czechoslovak Political Field.

(Gil Eyal).

9 The Cunning of Imperialist Reason.

(Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant).

Key Writings of Pierre Bourdieu on Democratic Politics.

Index