PIERRE BOURDIEU AND THE INVENTION OF THE STATE
Special Sociology colloquium/Public sociology event
Monday 16 March 2015, 2-4pm
In On the State, his first major posthumous book (based on his lecture course at the Collège de France in 1989-1992), Bourdieu offers an analytic dissection of state theory, a reinterpretation of the historical transition from “the house of the king” to the “reason of state,” and a model of the state as organizing power anchored by the concept of “bureaucratic field” and the notion of the “monopolization of legitimate symbolic violence.” He correlates the forging of the modern Leviathan, based on the bureaucratic mode of reproduction, with the coining of the public, the simultaneous advance and private appropriation of the universal, and the rise of cultural capital. Contributors to this panel will engage the facets of this watershed book that connect with their own research to provide a collective assessment of its import and implications for the social science of the state, power, and citizenship.
Chair: Loïc Wacquant (UCB, Sociology)
Mara Loveman (Berkeley Sociology, author of National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America)
Frank Poupeau (CNRS, author of State Sociologists and editor of Bourdieu, On the State)
Dylan Riley (Berkeley Sociology, author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism)
Loïc Wacquant (Berkeley Sociology, author of Tracking the Penal State)