Class, Lifestyles and Politics: Homologies of Social Position, Taste and Political Stances

Abstract

In this chapter we focus on the notion of homology, understood as a systematic correspondence between social structures. We discuss and empirically assess a specific hypothesis forwarded in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction about a homologous relationship between three structures: a social space, a space of lifestyles and a space of political stances. Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we advance a novel technique for assessing the homology thesis. Focusing on the case of contemporary Norwegian society, we show that the distinct social universes of class, culture and politics exhibit strikingly similar structures. The structure of the social space – with a primary division between high and low volumes of capital, and a secondary chiastic division between cultural and economic – is echoed in both the space of lifestyles and the space of political stances. The chapter not only unveils the persistence of class-structured lifestyles and political attitudes, it also develops methodological tools to move beyond the misguided substantialist fallacy often implicated in assessing the homology thesis. The truly relational way of assessing it, we argue, is to compare rigorously the structures of independently constructed spaces, and not singular variables drawn from the social universes in question.