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.Both were public sociologists, but also major public intellectuals, and not just in their own countries, but across the world.Both served their scholarly apprenticeships as professionals, but soon sought out wider audiences.Neither hesitated to enter the political arena as an intellectual, and their careers displayed a steady movement from the academy into the public sphere.Mills was writing in an era of passivity, and his notions of mass society reflect this.Like Beauvoir, he inspired a movement he never anticipated – the New Left of the 1960s.It remains to be seen whether Bourdieu will inspire such a movement – certainly his political writings and addresses played an important role in public debate in France.Both held out hope for intellectuals as a ‘third force’, as Mills once called it, that would pioneer progressive politics in the name of reason and freedom.CLASSES AND DOMINATIONBourdieu has come to be known for his meta-theoretical framework – centring on fields, habitus and capital, and above all on symbolic violence – that transcended his own empirical projects, a theoretical framework that has been taken up by others.Mills’s only venture into broader theoretical issues, Character and Social Structure, written with Hans Gerth (Gerth & Mills, 1954), was never taken up by sociologists.Nonetheless, Mills’s critical evaluation of the social structures of his time and his invitation to the sociological imagination have inspired successive generations of students.There are definite parallels in Bourdieu’s corpus, since, like Mills, he rarely made sorties into pure theory, even though his empirical research was always more theoretically self-conscious than Mills’s.Its impact transcends sociology not just in reaching the public realm, but it has also spread into many disciplines, beyond sociology and beyond the social sciences into the humanities.The three major works of Mills to address US society in the 1950s dealt sequentially with labour and its leaders (The New Men of Power, 1948), the new middle classes (White Collar, 1951) and the dominant class (The Power Elite, 1956).Mills’s framework for studying US society does develop over the decade of his writing, but there is also a clear continuity in his approach to that society: ever-greater concentration of power in a cohesive economic-political-military elite; a passive, but burgeoning new middle class of professionals, managers, sales workers and bureaucrats; and, finally, a working class betrayed by its leaders.These are also the three classes treated in Bourdieu’s monumental Distinction.Whereas Mills works his way up the social hierarchy, Bourdieu works his way down, from the dominant classes to the petty bourgeoisie, and finally to the working class.Both study the way the dominant classes impose their will on society, but where Mills focuses on the concentration of resources and decision making in the power elite, Bourdieu takes this concentration of power and wealth for granted, instead focusing on how domination is hidden or legitimated by the categories that the dominant classes use to secure their domination.Bourdieu, therefore, aims his analysis at symbolic domination – the exercise of domination through its misrecognition.Simply put, the dominant class distinguishes itself by its cultural taste.Whether this be in art, architecture, music or literature, the dominant class presents itself as more refined and more at ease with its cultural consumption than the petite bourgeoisie, whose taste is driven by emulation, and the working class, whose lifestyle is driven by economic necessity.The distinction of the dominant class actually derives from its privileged access to wealth and education, but it appears to be innate, thereby justifying its domination in all spheres of life.According to Bourdieu, the popular aesthetic of the working class – its concern with function rather than form, with the represented rather than the representation – is a dominated aesthetic, bereft of genuine critical impulse.Bourdieu’s innovation, therefore, turns on viewing class not just as an economic-political-social formation, but also as a cultural formation.Class members possess not just economic capital, but also cultural capital, so that a class structure is a two-dimensional space defined hierarchically by the total volume of capital, but also horizontally (within class) by the composition of capital (i.e.the specific combination of economic and cultural capital).He shows how this class structure is mirrored in the distribution of cultural practices and patterns of consumption.It is interesting to compare this vision of class structure with Mills’s Power Elite, where he describes the dominant class as three interlocking sets of institutions – economic, political and military.He calls them ‘domains’, but he might as well have called them fields [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]