Lecture of 10 March 1988

1. Internal reading, external reading and autonomy
2. Forgetting the microcosm
3. The coherence and normativity of the law
4. The space of works and the space of positions
5. A canonical text by d’Aguesseau
6. The invention of the public as a new sovereign

[The recording at our disposal lacks the start of the lecture. The length of the missing passage is difficult to estimate. To better understand the starting point of these lectures, it is helpful to refer to Julien Duval’s essay situating ‘Pierre Bourdieu at the Gates of the State’, below.]

Durkheim said that there is one serious problem which the sociologist cannot approach without fear and trembling, which is the problem of the State.1 This problem is all the more difficult because people are constantly giving their often wrong-headed opinions on it, and I fall back on this argument: the particular difficulty of sociology, as Durkheim himself said,2 is that we are all amateur sociologists; we all think we have the answers to even the most awkward scientific questions. The problem of the State is inherently difficult, but in addition the State has never been such a subject of debate as it is today (nor the subject of so many silly opinions). This leads me to approach the problem in a negative manner,3 obliquely, moving gradually inwards towards what I believe to be its centre.

After a certain number of preliminary considerations, I shall approach the problem of the law and more precisely the problem of how a group may come to proclaim how the world should be. For indeed it is of the essence of the corps of jurists to be socially mandated – and partly self-mandated – not only to state the facts of life, but also to proclaim what these should be. We are so used to them taking this upon themselves that it appears to be self-evident, but if we stop to think for a moment, there is something scandalous, extraordinary and astounding here: how can a group, however respectable, come to feel authorized to say what should happen in the social world? How can it mandate itself, or be mandated, to decide on questions of life or death? In other words, what right do they have to say what is right and lawful, or (the question that was raised in May ‘68, among other very good questions),4 who is to judge the legitimacy of the judges?5 Are the judges best placed to decree their own legitimacy? But put in these terms, the question is inadequate. It voices the rather ironic tendency which often motivates sociology and is its primary instinct. Although this critical tendency to look behind the scenes, to be suspicious of all wearers of wigs and gowns, does allow us to take the first steps towards establishing a science of the social world, it then becomes an obstacle to attaining a rigorous knowledge of that world. This is one of the questions that I would like to raise (but there will be others).

Before I launch into the details of my analysis, I would like to say that a social space like this one [the lecture hall of the Collège de France] is not very suitable for discussions and questions and answers, as you can imagine. And so, in order to promote a form of exchange that I would find extraordinarily useful, I propose to ask you, as I have always done in the past, to place on my table, during the break for instance, a piece of paper, either signed or anonymous, with questions or objections for me to answer. If it seems possible and easy to do so I shall try to answer straight away, or otherwise in the next lecture. In any case I find it psychologically important [to proceed like this], because all speech raises the question of its own legitimacy, and one way of feeling some slight justification in monopolizing speech is to have the feeling that you are answering people’s questions. You will see that one of the texts which I intend to comment on today resorts to this form of legitimization, and even if we may doubt its scientific validity, this legitimization does have a psychological validity. So if you have any objections or questions, I encourage you very strongly to write them down on a piece of paper and place it on my table so that I can try to reply. I should point out that this procedure is important because, for reasons of time or professional discretion, I shall constantly suppose that you know things which you may possibly be ignorant of. So I insist, don’t hesitate to raise questions even if you think they may be trivial or I: I questions are often the most fundamental ones and they might oblige me to fill in details or plug gaps I have left in my argument, or, as often happens to me, to admit that I simply don’t know the answer.

Internal reading, external reading and autonomy

Now to start with, I want to recall the text that the different speakers at the seminar agreed to discuss:6 it was an article on the notion of the juridical field that I had published under the title ‘La force du droit’ (The force of the law) in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, number 64.7 The article is rather [Bourdieu hesitates in choosing his adjectives] defensive, abstract and obscure. I shall try to summarize its substance very briefly, as an introduction to the problem that I want to deal with today, while attempting to take the argument further.

In this text I try to show that the law raises an issue common to all learned discourse, or any discourse with claims to being universal, including philosophical and even scientific discourse, and, more generally, all forms of expression (such as painting and literature, for instance): to understand these particular forms of expression we need to avoid the alternatives that have shackled scientific debates up until now. For instance, in the area of philosophy, or even more in the area of literature, which have been relatively spared by objectifying analysis, two camps confront each other in a crude alternative based on the ‘either–or’ principle. The first position, whose recent form is what they call ‘semiology’, is occupied by internal analysts who claim that to understand a juridical or literary corpus, a poem, the work of a painter or a philosopher, you need to study the work and nothing but the work itself. The internal reading of the text taken in itself and for itself, considered as a coherent whole, must reveal what the text contains. The opposite, antagonistic position takes as its object of study not the text itself but the context, that is, the social space in which the text, or more simply the author of the text, is produced. This tradition has been illustrated by people like Lukács, Goldmann or Adorno on the subject of Heidegger, for example.8 To simplify, this manner of proceeding consists in seeing the texts as reflections and, in the case of law, as tools: their discourse, corpus, codes and laws are considered to be reflections of social institutions or forces (society, the dominant class, etc.) and, as such, to serve as instruments for the social groups that they express.

In the case of law, the internal readers are to be found in the camp of the doctors. This is a property that law shares with philosophy: in both cases the specialists have monopolized the history of their discipline. In practice they are the only two corps that have established the history of their discipline as a separate science. The history of philosophy is an empire within an empire, it is independent, it is not taught in history classes. It is taught by philosophers in a very special manner, that is very different from the manner of historians. This private domain is one of the means whereby a discipline works to preserve its autonomy: none shall enter here if not a philosopher, none shall enter here if not a jurist. The history of law, like the history of philosophy, is monopolized by those who have paid their entrance fee to join what I call a ‘field’ and who accept the fundamental preconditions that you accept on entering the corps of philosophers or jurists. You don’t even think about it; you find it natural for the history of law to be written by jurists or the history of philosophy by philosophers, and only philosophers, who rise up and cry scandal, denouncing reductionism or positivism, as soon as anyone who is not a declared philosopher ventures to study that special object, philosophy. This kind of postulate of autonomy is very important, and one of the objects that I shall investigate today is the constitution of an autonomous cultural universe and of a corps of people who are, almost literally, bound up with this autonomous corpus. […]

[It is often useful?] to take an expression literally: when we speak of an ‘internal reading’, ‘internal’ signifies that the text is taken in itself and for itself, that is, read by people who are on the inside of the group of those who know that the text should be read for itself and in itself. The internal reading is the reading performed by those who accept the precondition according to which a text by Descartes, for instance, has been removed from history once and for all time, and I have the right to read it without having any idea who Descartes was. I can even profess that it is important to have no idea … thus Heidegger kept repeating that you should not take an interest in the author’s world, that this world was of no importance, and he had a certain interest in saying this.

To be more precise: the...