The Interest in Disinterestedness

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 Sciences 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.

Editor’s note


Year of 1987-1988


March 10 1988
Internal reading, external reading and autonomy - Forgetting the microcosm - The coherence and normativity of the law - The space of works and the space of positions - A canonical text by d’Aguesseau - The invention of the public as a new sovereign.


March 17 1988
Common sense and the feel for the game in a field - The transfiguration of common sense into specialised meanings (sequel) - Producing a love for the game - Two other questions - The double historicization - The Jansenist influence and the problem of self-love - Inventing the public: the oracle effect - Producing the universal with individual interests


March 24 1988
What is a quotation? - The effect of the social sciences on the social world - From interesting conditions to disinterestedness - The principle of sufficient reason and its suspension - Logical logic and practical logics - Conditions creating interest in disinterestedness - Spontaneous submission to the rules of the field - Genesis of the rules of the juridical field - Business law and pure law - Cross-checking - The force of the ideal - Escaping historicism.


Lecture of April 14 1988
The claim to be universal - Does a space beyond positions exist? - Two canonical positions - The organicist metaphor - A quasi-divine viewpoint - Durkheim’s lapses - The reinvention of Hegel’s theory - The State, a movement towards unity - Bureaucracy - Durkheim, State sociologist.


Lecture of April 21 1988
A charitable reading of Marx’s theory of the State - An enchanted vision and a disenchanted vision of the State - The unconscious corporatism of the sociologists - A sociological critique of the social sciences - First false problem: does sociology liberate or  manipulate? Second false problem: continuity or break? - Towards a social history of the social sciences - The ‘prehistory of the social sciences’ - The birth of the social sciences in an awkward position - Scientific sociology and France as a special case - The separation of  national traditions during the interwar period - The triumphant postwar development


Year of 1988-1989


Lecture of January 19 1989
The essays on the State - Disinterestedness is suspect - An inverted world and its genesis - The ghost of economic reality - Understanding the oblates - Two universal observations.


Lecture of  January 26 1989
A plan for an enquiry into the Pechiney affair - A transhistorical sociology of ethical dispositions - The habitus and the Kantian ethic.


Lecture of February 2 1989

The regulated transgression of the bureaucratic rule - Political field and bureaucratic field - The categories of technocratic understanding - The notion of profession, a scholarly myth - The definition of the concept


Lecture of February 9 1989
A sociodicy behind the description of a historical process - The profession, a scholarly myth - Profession, corps and field - The theory of the professions as a negative theory of the State - The school as liberator - Continuity and genesis of the great corps.


Lecture of February 16 1989
The medical profession and the State - Weber and the ‘educational patent’ - Sate magic, certification, magic and the educational universe - The confinement of the dominant - A programme of research - Approaching the State - The time of law - The origins of sociology.


Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State. Situating the Lectures of 1987-1988 and 1988-1989
Julien Duval


Summaries of the Lectures Published in the Annual of the Collège de France


Notes
Index