On the State

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being
and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power
that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all
spheres of social, political and economic life?

In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses
these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber's famous
definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of
legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of
symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise
of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an
apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a
neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it
constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole
of social life. The 'collective fiction' of the state
D a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the
product of all struggles between different interests, what is at
stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.

While the question of the state runs through the whole of
Bourdieu's work, it was never the subject of a book designed
to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to
which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the
Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that
brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text
also shows 'another Bourdieu', both more concrete and
more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of
its development. While revealing the illusions of 'state
thought' designed to maintain belief in government being
oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally
critical of an 'anti-institutional mood' that is all
too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus
to the function of maintaining social order.

At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty
dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion
of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments
needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of
domination.

Auteur

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the most influential sociologists and anthropologists of the late twentieth century. He was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales. His many works include Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, The Rules of Art, The Logic of Practice and Pascalian Meditations.

Résumé
What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life?

In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber's famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The 'collective fiction' of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.

While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu's work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows 'another Bourdieu', both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of 'state thought' designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an 'anti-institutional mood' that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order.

At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

Contenu
Editors' note

Year 1989-1990

Lecture of 18 January 1990
An inconceivable object. The state as neutral site. The Marxist tradition. The calendar and the structure of temporality. State categories. Acts of state. The private housing market and the state. The 'Barre commission' on housing.

Lecture of 25 January 1990
The theoretical and the empirical. State commissions and productions. The social construction of public problems. The state as viewpoint of viewpoints. Official marriage. Theory and theory effects. The two meanings of the word 'state'. Transforming the particular into the universal. The obsequium. Institutions as 'organized trustee'. Genesis of the state. Difficulties of the undertaking. Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology.

Lecture of 1 February 1990
The rhetoric of the official. The public and the official. The universal other and censorship. The 'legislator as artist'. The genesis of public discourse. Public discourse and imposition of form. Public opinion.

Lecture of 8 February 1990
The concentration of symbolic resources. Sociological reading of Franz Kafka. An untenable research programme. History and sociology. Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt's The Political Systems of Empires. Perry Anderson's two books. The problem of Barrington Moore's 'three roads'.

Lecture of 15 February 1990
The official and the private. Sociology and history: genetic structuralism. Genetic history of the state. Game and field. Anachronism and illusion of the nominal. The two faces of the state.

Year 1990-1991

Lecture of 10 January 1991

Historical approach and genetic approach. Research strategy. Housing policy. Interactions and structural relations. Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization. The effect of 'that's the way it is' and the closing of possibilities. The space of possibilities. The example of spelling.

Lecture of 17 January 1991
Reminder of the course's procedure. The two meanings of the word 'state': state as administration, state as territory. The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle. Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias. Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly.

Lecture of 24 January 1991

Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint. Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer. The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms.

Lecture of 31 January 1991
Reply to questions. Cultural archaisms and economic transformations. Culture and national unity: the case of Japan. Bureaucracy and cultural integration. National unification and cultural domination.

Lecture of 7 February 1991
Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power. Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning. The state as producer of principles of classification. Belief effect and cognitive structures. The coherence effect of state symbolic systems. The sch…