Marx/Bourdieu: Convergences and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation

Abstract

This text proposes a partial confrontation between the critical thought of Karl Marx and that of Pierre Bourdieu, within the framework of a new exploratory hermeneutics of theoretical texts, which breaks with the presupposition of coherency of “works” and “authors” in the wake of Michel Foucault’s warnings in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). By dissociating the concepts and methods from the “works” from which they are derived, our ambition is to create renewed “sparks of knowledge.” To do this, we will keep at a distance from the systematic reconstructions called “Marxism” or “Bourdieusianism.” Four fields are explored. The first field concerns the methodology of the social sciences: specifically, the relationship between observed concrete facts and theoretical abstraction. The second field concerns the sociology of social classes between objectivism and constructivism. Bourdieu’s “structuralist constructivism” and Marx’s hesitations between economism and constructivism are compared. The third field concerns the theory of praxis between the sociology of action and revolutionary politics. The fourth field concerns the political philosophy of emancipation, important in Marx’s approach, present but more marginal in Bourdieu, who is rather inspired by Spinoza’s work on the knowledge of determinisms, thus narrower than that of Marx.