NM's blog

Échanger autre chose que de l'argent

Symbolic Violence and the Naturalisation of Power Relations   A student's take of Bourdieu's ideas on the subject.

Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a  2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,”  or “NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and “their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ʻshareholder-valueʼ conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic a...

Whether it is Thatcher or Reagan, Blair or Holland, Trump or Macron, Temer or May .. . "[I]n the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it [neoliberallism] brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application ." The essence of neoliberalism  (Pierre Bourdieu, 1998)

" The ruling class supports Macron because he can help transform the Fifth Republic’s political-institutional system and preserve its capacity to dictate government policy in the years ahead. Macron’s election would radically realign French politics, clearing the way for a reform agenda that has faced numerous obstacles over the past twenty years.  M acron belongs to the inner circle of the French ruling class, what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed the “ state nobility .” A number of sociologists, from  Ezra Suleiman  to  Pierre Birnbaum , have demonstrated that these high-ranking civil servants constitute the most powerful social group in France."

"Percy Schramm a montré comment les cérémonies du sacre étaient le transfert, dans l’ordre du politique, de cérémonies religieuses.  Si le cérémonial religieux peut se transférer aussi facilement dans les cérémonies politiques, à travers les cérémonies du sacre, c’est parce qu’il s’agit, dans les deux cas, de faire croire qu’il y a un fondement au discours qui n’apparaît comme autofondateur, légitime, universel que parce qu’il y a théâtralisation — au sens d’évocation magique, de sorcellerie — du groupe uni et consentant  au discours qui l’unit." La fabrique des debats publics