Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology

Abstract

This article examines Bourdieu’s contributions to history and historical sociology. Bourdieu has often been misread as an ahistorical ‘reproduction theorist’ whose work does not allow for diachronic change or human agency. The article argues that both reproduction and social change, constraint and freedom, are at the heart of Bourdieu’s project. Bourdieu’s key concepts — habitus, field, cultural and symbolic capital — are all inherently historical. Bourdieu deploys his basic categories using a distinctly historicist social epistemology organized around the ideas of conjuncture, contingency, overdetermination, and radical discontinuity. The origins of Bourdieu’s historicism are traced to his teachers at the École Normale Supérieure and to the long-standing aspirations among French historians and sociologists to unify the two disciplines. The historical nature of Bourdieu’s work is also signalled by its pervasive influence on historians and the historical work of his former students and colleagues. Bourdieu allowed sociology to historicize itself to a greater extent than other French sociologists.