Sociological Analysis and Socio-Political Change: Juxtaposing Elements of the Work of Bourdieu, Passeron and Lyotard

Abstract

The paper considers the relationship between sociological analysis and political action by subjecting the work of Bourdieu to scrutiny, especially in relation to the work of some of his contemporaries – Raymond Aron, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Jean-François Lyotard. The first part of the discussion focuses on educational research carried out collaboratively by Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1960s and considers the shared assumptions that underpin their projects. The paper discusses their philosophical divergence after the beginning of the 1970s, suggesting that Bourdieu's development was essentially in the Durkheimian tradition whereas Passeron's was more sympathetic to the legacy of Weber. Bourdieu's inclination to regard objective science as the product of subjective disposition meant his social science became inseparable from his socio-political mission, whereas Passeron distanced himself from Bourdieu's phenomenological or ontological reflexivity. The second part of the paper suggests Bourdieu is trying to practise phenomenological sociology within a historical social situation that, after 1979, was rapidly transforming into the postmodern condition, the diagnosis of which Lyotard had provided as an extension of his own reading of Husserl. The paper goes on to argue that, while La distinction sought to reconcile modernist sociology with postmodernism, Bourdieu could not relinquish what Aron regarded as the totalizing orientation of ‘sociologism’. Although Lyotard, in contrast, pursued the implications of his own insights in a philosophical exegesis of Kant, the paper explores how there may yet be scope for some more fruitful view of the contemporary relationship between sociology and politics in mass democracy, particularly if we advocate socio-analytic reflexivity in association with a recognition of the ‘différend’.