Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics

We underestimate the properly political power to change social life by changing the represention of social life, and by putting a modicum of imagination in power. Pierre Bourdieu, "Donner la parole aux gens sans parole" (1977) Pierre Bourdieu has rarely been read as a political sociologist or philosopher. 1 And yet there is sense in which his oeuvre as well as much of his intellectual activity represents a sustained, multiprong attempt to chisel a science of the social conditions of possibility of democracy - broadly defined as that social state wherein everyone would possess both the inclination and the ability to take matters political into their own hands - and to detect the historical pitfalls and possibilities of the struggles aimed at fostering its advance in different realms of life. The epicentral place that the notion of symbolic power and issues of repre- sentation, delegation, nomination, and (mis)recognition occupy in Bourdieu's work suggest that they constitute a major untapped store of concepts, theories, and insights for rethinking the links between freedom, justice, and politics. It is useful, to elucidate the vexed relation of Bourdieu to the question of demo- cratic politics, to distinguish, if only for the sake of analytical clarity, between three tightly intervoven elements: (1) the personal political views of the individ- ual Pierre Bourdieu, which are pertinent insofar as they animate his scientific practice and civic engagements; (2) politics as encountered in his sociological writings, or how he treats the official institutions that compose the public sphere of liberal democracies, parties and unions, parliaments and polls, the media and the state, as objects of social scientific inquiry; and, last but not least, (3) the poli- tics of Bourdieu's works, that is, the role he assigns to science and intellectuals in democratic battles, and the implications and uses of his thought in and for the gamut of power struggles ranging from intimate gender battles on the home front to the cross-continental mass mobilization against the neoliberal revolution sweeping the globe today. A brief consideration of each of these elements helps set the stage for the following special section, which brings together articles that variously explicate theoretically and extend empirically Bourdieu's conception of democracy, and demonstrate the heuristic potency of his theory of symbolic power as applied to organized politics.