Bourdieu's Engagement With Althusserian Marxism: The Question of The State

Bourdieu’s engagement with Althusserian Marxism: The question of
the state
Julien Pallotta
In Actuel Marx Volume 58, Issue 2, 2015, pages 130 to 143
Translated and edited by Cadenza Academic Translations
Translator: Robin Mackay, Editor: Aidan Cowlard Joyce, Senior Editor: Mark Mellor
ISSN 0994-4524
ISBN 9782130650812
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PRESENTATION SPECIAL REPORT INTERVENTIONS CURRENT DEBATE REVIEWS
BOURDIEU’S ENGAGEMENT
WITH ALTHUSSERIAN MARXISM:
THE QUESTION OF THE STATE
By Julien PALLOTTA
Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations
Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism was a vexed one, involving

a mixture of proximity and deliberate distancing—particularly in the
case of the Marxism he had encountered during his student years at the
École Normale: Althusserian Marxism.1 Relations between Bourdieu and
Althusser were marked by Bourdieu’s break with his original discipline
(philosophy) and his determination to go beyond this discipline or to
realize its aims from within sociology (itself constituted as a total anthro-
pology). Inevitably, the sociologist would see Althusser, who continued
to reserve a central place for philosophy within the academic domain, as a I
representative of the philosophical aristocratism that hails philosophy as
“queen” of the disciplines. But on the whole Bourdieu carefully avoided
citing Althusser explicitly,2 contenting himself with attacking the theory
of “Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).”3 To get at Althusser, whom he

almost never cited by name, he targeted his disciples and collaborators. For
example, when he penned a derisive text on Étienne Balibar’s “rhetoric of
scientificity,” attacking the early Althusser’s “theoreticist” position and its
claim that (Marxist) philosophy occupies a dominant position in relation
to other theoretical practices;4 or again at the end of the 1970s,5 when he
set his theory of the school against that of Christian Baudelot and Roger
Establet who, in L’École capitaliste en France, had set out to distinguish
1. For an analysis of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx himself, see Éric Gilles, “Marx dans l’oeuvre de Bourdieu. Approbations
fréquentes, oppositions radicales,” Actuel Marx 2, no. 56 (Autumn 2014): 147–63.
2. When Bourdieu does mention Althusser in his books, it is more often as an “object” of sociological study than as a theorist whose
ideas are being discussed. See Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1988), 262 and 305 n. 54.
3. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Le mort saisit le vif. Les relations entre l’histoire réifiée et l’histoire incorporée,” Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales 32 (1980): 3–14, and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 3–4 and 53.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, “Le discours d’importance. Quelques remarques critiques sur ‘Quelques remarques critiques à propos de Lire
Le Capital,’” Language et pouvoir symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 2001): 379–96. [Translator’s note: This essay is one of those omitted
from the English translated volume Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991)].
5. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984), 154.
Actuel Marx / n° 58 / 2015: History and Class Struggle

HISTORY AND CLASS STRUGGLE
J. PALLOTTA, Bourdieu’s engagement with Althusserian Marxism: The question of the state
themselves from him.6 This silent presence of Althusser in Bourdieu’s

work, and the polemical and mocking tone with which he treated his
disciples, leads one to suspect a certain discomfort on Bourdieu’s part in
regard to a figure from whom he is driven to distinguish himself at all
costs. Indeed, very often these gestures of demarcation only fully make
sense when seen in the context of a disquieting proximity between the
two.
This proximity continues to manifest itself today, reconstructed a pos-
teriori in the hostility provoked by both theorists: it is difficult today not
to see a link between Althusser’s theory of ideological subjection and
Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, given Rancière’s successive critiques
of both. It is as if, over the course of Rancière’s intellectual itinerary, he
had to constitute his thinking of emancipation firstly, during the 1970s,
against Althusserianism (described as “scientistic Marxism”) and then,
in the 1980s, against Bourdieu’s sociology, its successor within the intel-
lectual space of French “leftism.”7 Here we would like to revisit the con-
_ frontation between Bourdieu and Althusser armed with the following
intuition of Rancière’s: even as Bourdieu launches his critique against
II the theory of “ISAs,” he maintains a kind of theoretical collusion with
_ it, proposing a theory of domination that seems just as implacable. The
confrontation between the two must therefore be taken up at the point
where Bourdieu left it: in relation to the theory of the state. Bourdieu’s
own analysis will allow us to see how he constructed his own political

theory in contradistinction to the Marxism of his time, and particularly
by rehabilitating a certain form of Hegelianism.
BOURDIEU’S CRITIQUE OF ALTHUSSER:

ALTHUSSER AS THE INTERNAL ENEMY?
Despite his criticisms of Althusser’s 1960s “theoreticism,” what really
fixed Bourdieu’s attention was the new theory of the state presented in his
article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” published in June
1970 in La Pensée.8 Now that we have access to the whole manuscript
from which Althusser excerpted the passages published in this article, we
can perceive all the better how novel his position here is in relation to
the Marxist tradition, as well as the problems and hesitations in which
it involves him. In accordance with the Marxist tradition, Althusser sees
the state as the machine of class domination, that is to say the instrument
6. Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, L’École capitaliste en France (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 313–16.
7. Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2009), 133–34.
8. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London
and New York: Verso, 2014), 232–72. This article was extremely compelling in the post-68 theoretico-political conjuncture. For a
study of its effects on Foucault, see my text “L’effet-Althusser sur Foucault: de la société punitive à la théorie de la reproduction,” in
Marx et Foucault, ed. Christian Laval, Luca Paltrinieri, and Ferhat Taylan (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), 129-42.
through which the dominant class subjects the dominated classes to the
capitalist relations of production. His innovation consists in the claim
that the obedience of subjects is not obtained principally through “fear
of the gendarme,”9 a gendarme he sees as a detachment of the “repres-
sive state apparatus” (RSA), the arm of the state apparatus that functions
predominantly by means of force. To account for the submission of indi-
viduals to the social order, Althusser forges the concept of the ideolog-
ical state apparatus (ISA), which designates any institution, regardless of
whether internal legal distinction deems it “private” or “public,” through
which the material conduct of individuals is governed by ideological
rituals. The broadening of the concept of the state beyond so-called
“public” institutions is made possible by a schema of unification: that of
the dominant ideology that is realized materially in the state apparatuses.
It is by equating dominant ideology with state ideology that Althusser
can understand the institutions that materially subject individuals to the
dominant ideology as ideological state apparatuses. The two major the-
oretical coups here are therefore the concept of a material ideology (an _
idea Althusser adopts from one of Pascal’s Pensées on prayer)10 and the
unification of various practices of submission under a state ideology. III
This theory of ISAs is so novel that it leaves the reader in something of _
a quandary: contrary to what is explicitly said in the manuscript, where
ISAs are positioned as the ultimate foundation of domination,11 the end
of the article seems to suggest that the reproduction of the social order

depends in its entirety upon the power of ideology: as the result of ide-
ological subjections, subjects “work by themselves.”12 From here there
seems no bar to seeing the reproduction of the social order as resting on
a “free” acceptance of subjection, and the reader may wonder whether
Althusser has not developed a kind of theory of voluntary servitude. It
is this theory of ideology that is the true bone of contention with his
former student Rancière, who sees it as a theory of necessary submission
to the social order that renders any revolt, and a fortiori any revolution,
unthinkable.13 To this day, in “general” theoretical culture, it is seen as the
manifestation of a structuralism for which structures are “populated by
agents conceived as their passive supports”14 and thus reproduce them-
selves ad aeternam.
9. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 66–68.

10. Ibid., 186.
11. Ibid., 141.
12. In French: “marchent tout seuls.” This pun in the French (the verb “marcher” meaning both “to walk” and “to work”) is un-
fortunately lost in translation here. A more accurate (and cumbersome) translation here would therefore be “walk and work by
themselves.” Ibid., 269.
13. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 125–54.
14. Frédéric Lordon, La Société des affects. Pour un structuralisme des passions (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 12.
The theory of ISAs leads Althusser to the point where he sees the
system of the ISAs (which between them operate a division of labor of ide-
ological domination) as an “invisible state.”15 This is doubtless Althusser’s
most original proposition, but it was to meet with major objections
within the field of Marxism itself: if class struggle is only mentioned in
a postscript to the article, a late addition, it is because Althusser’s theory
does not recognize the centrality that Marxism gives to it.16 In attempting
to respond to these criticisms, in order to toe the revolutionary political
line Althusser would be forced into a theoretical one-upmanship: since
the theory of ISAs makes the party itself an element of the political ISA,
he was obliged to demand that the party must be “outside the state,” as a
precursor to communism.17
Apart from the divergences between Bourdieu’s and Althusser’s polit-
ical perspectives,18 the sociologist’s main criticism of the Marxist phi-
losopher and his theoretical tradition relates to his having identified in
them a “functionalism” that defines the state in terms of its function (i.e.,
_ reproduction of the relations of production) “without investigating the
actual structure of the mechanisms deemed to produce its foundation.”19
IV According to Bourdieu, the error of this “functionalism” (a “pessimistic
_ functionalism” when it is employed to account for an implacable domi-
nation) lies in its recourse to the notion of the apparatus:
I am very much against the notion of apparatus, which


for me is the Trojan horse of “pessimistic functionalism”: an
apparatus is an infernal machine, programmed to accom-
plish certain purposes no matter what, when or where.
(This fantasy of the conspiracy, the idea that an evil will is
responsible for everything that happens in the social world,
haunts critical social thought.) The school system, the state,
the church, political parties, or unions are not apparatuses
but fields. In a field, agents and institutions constantly
struggle, according to the regularities and the rules consti-
tutive of this space of play. [. . .] Those who dominate in
15. Louis Althusser, “Some Questions Concerning the Crisis of Marxist Theory and of the International Communist Movement,”
Historical Materialism 23, no. 1 (2015): 152–78.
16. Alain Badiou addressed this critique to Althusser in 1976. See Alain Badiou, “De l’idéologie,” in Les Années rouges (Paris: Les
Prairies ordinaires, 2012), 97–200.
17. Louis Althusser, Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes (Paris: PUF, 1998), 290. One may well ask whether Althusser did not
become trapped in the aporia of a choice between total freedom (complete exit from subjectivating ideology) or complete absence
of freedom (submission to the ISAs, even in the forms of resistance that traverse them). See Étienne Balibar, “Preface,” in Althusser,
The Infinite Farewell, ed. Emilio Ipola (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), xiii–xxiv.
18. For Bourdieu, Althusser’s “revolutionism” is, like any intellectual’s revolutionism, a hyperbolic will rooted in a disconnection from
the realities of the social world. See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 2.
19. Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2014), 5.
a given field are in a position to make it function to their

advantage, but they must always contend with the resist-
ance, the claims, the contention, “political” or otherwise,
of the dominated.20
Whereas the notion of the apparatus enters Althusser’s work from

the texts of the Marxist tradition on the state, the notion of field for-
mulated by Bourdieu derives from the Durkheimian sociological tradi-
tion, according to which the social has progressively differentiated itself
into a relatively autonomous world.21 But above all, Bourdieu adds his
essential concept of habitus, functioning in tandem with the notion of
the field: the principle of the so-called “ISA’s” effectiveness resides in the
agreement between the objective structures of the field and the subjective
structures of the habitus (the incorporated dispositions through which
agents relate to the social world).22 And yet, beyond this critique, there
remains a sense that Bourdieu is somewhat closer to Althusser than he
wants to recognize: the concept of habitus, which designates an incorpo- _
ration of cognitive structures, is not entirely without resonance with the
Althusserian concept of material ideology,23 all the more so given that V
both theorists, to differing degrees, refer to Pascal in their respective treat- _
ments of the subject. The recourse to “ideological power” in Althusser
and “symbolic power” in Bourdieu both stem from the same observation:
that the reproduction of the social order cannot be explained by “fear of

the gendarme,”24 but supposes the operation of a type of power other
than the repressive. Bourdieu’s silent animosity toward Althusser is that
of a thinker who, combining field studies, statistical tools, and historical
reference, attempted to put his concepts to work in the domain of empir-
ical knowledge; but the fundamental philosophical orientation driving
them is not necessarily so very different.
Moreover, Bourdieu’s determination to distinguish himself at all costs
from Althusser is also linked, confusedly, to the fact that the “pessimistic
functionalism” he accuses Althusser of is not without resonance with the
overall impression produced by his own sociology, where social agents,
by aligning their objective chances of attaining a position with their sub-
jective hopes, end up accepting the social world as it is, and remaining in
the place it allots to them: the “causality of the probable”25 is not far from
20. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 102.
21. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 433 n. 2.
22. Ibid., 4, 53.
23. See Gérard Mauger, “Sur la violence symbolique,” in Pierre Bourdieu théorie et pratique. Perspectives franco-allemandes, ed.
Hans-Peter Müller and Yves Sintomer (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 89 n. 12.
24. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 66–68 and Bourdieu, On the State, 52.
25. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 231.
presenting a social world held together by an implacable dominance, no

less suffocating than the “voluntary servitude” of the subjects evoked at
the end of Althusser’s article. If we were to strip Althusser of his revolu-
tionary perspective, we might well find a theory similar to Bourdieu’s. But
paradoxically, it is above all Althusser’s relative advance over Bourdieu
that highlights their convergence: not content to speak of the various
ideological practices of different ideological apparatuses, Althusser goes
further and unifies them under the idea of an “invisible state” that he sees
as an “ideological state.” And Bourdieu, in his course on the state at the
Collège de France, would precisely end up recognizing that this had been
his own theoretical journey: from a theory of symbolic power (still called
“ideological” in 1977)26 to a theory of the state.27 We shall now examine
this journey, understanding it as a response to the Marxism of its times.
THE THEORY OF THE STATE AS MONOPOLY

OF SYMBOLIC CAPITAL:
_ A HEGELIAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY?
Unlike Althusser, who makes little reference to history in his research,
VI Bourdieu holds that a theory of the state must be a genetic history. The
_ advantage of returning to the origin is that one thereby combats the
“amnesia of genesis”28 and shows that what is perceived as natural or
“self-evident” today has not always been perceived as such. Bourdieu’s
general thesis is that the state is constituted via an accumulation of

processes of the concentration or monopolization of different types of
capital: economic capital with the formation of the unified economic
space, linguistic capital with the formation of a unified linguistic market,
information capital with the formation of various bodies of knowledge
(including statistics) concerning the population it is to govern, legal cap-
ital with the formation of a unified juridical market, capital of physical
force with the claim to a monopoly on violence through the police and the
army, etc. Bourdieu adopts Weber’s formula of “the monopoly on legiti-
mate physical violence,” but extends it to all of the spaces or social fields
progressively constituted via differentiation. The results of Bourdieu’s
sociological research on the state end up completing his research on the
differentiation of society into relatively autonomous social fields, for
this differentiation turns out to be inseparable from another movement,
that of the constitution of a united society or a “unified social space.”29
26. Pierre Bourdieu, “On Symbolic Power” (1977), in Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson
(Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 163–70: 168.
27. Bourdieu, On the State, 182.
28. Ibid., 115.
29. Ibid., 223.
It is the state, as “meta-field”30 or “meta-capital,”31 that enables power to

be exercised over all forms of capital, which in turn contributes to the
constitution of fields. The state becomes the instance through which is
operated the unification or totalization of society into a nation-state; and
this centrality of the state makes it the stake of struggles between these
fields themselves.
The historical study of the beginnings of the state reveals how, con-
trary to current appearances of naturalness and the self-evidence of “that’s
just how it is,” this construction-by-accumulation of monopolies is not
a foregone conclusion: it meets with social and political resistance along
the way. Bourdieu gives the example of the revolt of the French nobles
against the emergence of the royal power to grant titles, that is to say
against the bureaucratization of the nobility and its gradual transforma-
tion into a state nobility. From a popular point of view, we should also
mention the various examples of the refusal of tax or of military conscrip-
tion. Turning to the works of Norbert Elias on this subject,32 Bourdieu
shows that the two monopolies claimed by the modern state on public _
violence and public finances are inseparable: the state cannot raise taxes
unless it has force, and it must raise taxes in order to finance its military VII
expenditure. But tax resistance shows us that raising taxes is problematic _
unless it is recognized as legitimate. And indeed, for Bourdieu, in the last
instance, power depends solely on the belief of those who are subjected
to it, that is to say on recognition. So the definition of the state that finally

synthesizes all the others, along with the “meta-field” or “meta-power,” is
its definition as the holder of the monopoly on symbolic capital, under-
stood as
any property (any form of capital whether physical,

economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social
agents endowed with categories of perception which cause
them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value.33
It is by thus defining symbolic capital as the ultimate foundation

of power, as “last instance” of the instances of the social whole, that
Bourdieu claims to distinguish himself from Marxism and its superstruc-
ture/infrastructure topic34 by proposing a “expanded materialism” or a
“materialist theory of the symbolic.”35 We might say that in doing so he
30. Ibid., 201.

31. Ibid., 223.
32. Ibid., 127–32.
33. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47.
34. Bourdieu, On the State, 183, 193.
35. Ibid., 193.
inscribes himself in a tradition of French social philosophy beginning

with Comte’s statement that “the whole social mechanism rests finally
on opinions,”36 even if he replaces the concept of opinion with that of
a thinking that is “incorporated” and infraconscious (the concept of
habitus).
A Hegelian schema of thought can be identified here: the state is the
mediating instance through which individuals recognize one another as
belonging to the same society. According to Bourdieu the power of the
state resides in its capacity to operate an “orchestration of habitus” and to
produce in its members a “common sense,” that
stock of self-evidences shared by all, which, within the

limits of a social universe, ensures a primordial consensus
on the meaning of the world, a set of tacitly accepted com-
monplaces which make confrontation, dialogue, competi-
tion and even conflict possible, and among which a special
_ place must be reserved for the principles of classification,
such as the major oppositions structuring the perception
VIII of the world.37
_
This idea of the production of a “common sense” that depends upon
the inculcation of principles for the classification and perception of the
social world is a version of the concept of “dominant ideology,” even if

Bourdieu denies this on the grounds that here there is no unified discourse
on the part of the dominant:38 he does not think that the dominant ide-
ology can be understood as the “dominance of a body of representations
or discursive paradigm, which thereby defines the epoch of its own more
or less unchallenged reign.”39
Extending this idea of a “common sense” produced by the state fur-
ther, we rediscover the Althusserian idea of an “invisible state,” in the
sense of a state become the unconscious thought-form of subjects: a state
become “symbolic order.” And just as Althusser grants primacy, within
the combined functioning of the ISAs, to the school as the apparatus that
realizes dominant ideology, so Bourdieu sees the school as the principal
institution through which the state inculcates a national “common sense”
in its members. Three points should be taken into account here. Firstly,
in a society where social position must increasingly depend upon educa-
tional qualification, the school ensures the conversion of cultural capital
36. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Frederick Ferré (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett,
1988), 28.
38. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 266.
39. Étienne Balibar, La Crainte des masses. Philosophie et politique avant et après Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 186–7.
acquired within the family into cultural capital recognized by the whole
of society through its authentication by the state. Secondly, by way of its
obligation to provide schooling for all members of the population, the
state produces the greatest possible effect of cognitive unification.40 And
lastly, in a society where one of the dominant principles of domination is
“merit” or “intelligence,”41 school operates the “sociodicy” of the domi-
nant, that is to say the justification of the social order: it may contribute,
in some part, to the distribution of knowledge and knowhow, but “it
also contributes, and increasingly so, to the distribution of power and
privilege and to the legitimation of this distribution.”42 In a society where
domination legitimates itself via technical competences, the dominant
must legitimate their domination in the name of the universality claimed
by the state. This is a decisive aspect of the formation of the state as iden-
tified with the bureaucratic field: the concentration-monopolization of
the universality claimed by the state cannot take place without a monop-
olization of the monopoly on the universal, that is to say without a claim
of universality on the part of specialists in the universal.43 _
The state must claim a monopoly on the universal, but this monopoly
“can only be obtained at the cost of a submission (if only in appearance) to IX
the universal and of a universal recognition of the universalist representa- _
tion of domination presented as legitimate and disinterested.”44 Bourdieu
argues that this ideal of disinterestedness, a law of the bureaucratic field
of the modern state, is founded upon an anthropological principle: “Thus

groups reward conduct that conforms universally (in reality, or at least in
intention) to virtue”—so much so that “it is a universal anthropological
law that there are benefits (symbolic and sometimes material) in sub-
jecting oneself to the universal, in projecting (at least) an appearance of
virtue, and adhering externally to an official rule.”45 We might say that,
in this sense, Bourdieu furnishes an anthropological foundation for the
Hegelian theory of the universal Stand, that is to say of those “intellec-
tuals” (die Gelehrten: educated people) who, “by their incorporation into
the state [. . .] can discover their true destiny” by raising “the different
particular interests of civil society [. . .] to the higher level of the general
interest.”46 We know that this theory of bureaucracy, as “universal Stand”
and as mediator of the “general interest,” lies at the basis of the Marxist

41. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 266, 334.
42. Ibid., 116
43. Once again, this thesis could be seen as being in line with the French tradition of social philosophy: it refers back to Comte’s
idea that, in the social division of tasks (in Bourdieu, the differentiation of fields), a class must emerge as “specialists” in theory (and
political competences).
44. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 59.
45. Ibid., 142.
46. See Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 51.
critique of the theory of the state: Althusser denounces the ideas of

“public service” and “general interest” as part of the “great mystification
of the state.”47 The Marxist critique consists in denouncing the general
interest as a universalization of the particular interests of the dominant
class: the state bureaucrat only apparently works for the general interest;
in reality, he is a usurper of the universal. And it is the Marxist critics of
Hegel, precisely, to whom Bourdieu wants to respond:
Those who—like Marx—invert the official image that

the bureaucracy likes to give of itself, and describe bureau-
crats as usurpers of the universal [. . .] ignore the very real
effects of the obligatory reference to the values of neutrality
and disinterested loyalty to the public good. Such values
impose themselves with increasing force upon the func-
tionaries of the state as the history of the long work of sym-
bolic construction unfolds whereby the official representa-
_ tion of the state as the site of universality and of service to
the general interest is invented and imposed.48
X
_ Through his theory of fields as relatively autonomous social universes,
and through the idea of a field functioning on the ideal of disinterest-
edness, Bourdieu answers the Marxist critique that sees the universal as
an illusory form serving solely as a disguise for particular interests: the

form of the universal itself constrains the agents that are supposed to
help realize it, and these agents may have an interest in disinterestedness.
Bourdieu carries out his critique of the Marxist critique through a logical
argument: one can reproach the Hegelian model of the bureaucrat for
serving particular interests under cover of serving the universal only if
one presupposes that the bureaucracy, as it claims, can genuinely serve
the universal.49 The treason of the universal can only be denounced in
the name of the universal that is “the universal strategy of legitimation.”50
And, beyond logical arguments, historically speaking the universal is pro-
gressively realized in the state: this is possible “because people have an
interest in the universal, which means that the universal is genetically
corrupt, though this does not therefore mean it is not universal.”51 The
thesis of a progressive realization of reason and of the universal in his-
tory, through the play of the interests of agents realizing their particular
47. Louis Althusser, “The Great Mystification of the State” (part of the text “Marx in his Limits”), in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later
Writings, 1978–87, ed. François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 118–23.
48. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 58.
49. Ibid., 144.
50. Ibid., 142.
interests in the universal, brings Bourdieu’s sociology of the state very

close to the Hegelian philosophy.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu states that the logic of history is not “linear
and cumulative” (as in an evolutionist philosophy),52 that the bureau-
cratic field experiences “advances and retreats,”53 and above all that, in
making the universal the universal strategy of legitimation, it makes this
universal the stake of all struggles and all conflicts. In keeping with the
Marxist tradition, the motor of history is conflict—but this conflict is
now read in Hegelian terms of a universal realized in and through the
state. The struggle will be a consequence of legitimation via the universal
and the autonomization of fields: the tendency to increasingly rationalize
domination, which
gives a particularly sharp edge to the legitimation antin-

omy universally encountered by temporal power holders
in their relationship with those whose power is associated
with the possession of one or another form of cultural _
capital. The latter, be they clerics or laypersons, are always
tempted to use to their own advantage the autonomy that XI
the dominants are compelled to concede to them because it _
creates the very value of the consecration and legitimation
that their “spiritual” interventions in the “temporal” order
are able to grant ultimately only in direct proportion to

their supposed independence.54
In virtue of the logic of the differentiation of fields and the constraint

on the extension of the circuit of legitimation (since self-congratulation
would have no particular effect, legitimation must assume a minimum
degree of autonomy on the part of the one who legitimates),55 the rela-
tively dominated who are the holders of cultural capital may, on the basis
of a homology of positions in social space, ally themselves conjuncturally
with the dominated in order to advance the cause of the universal.56 It
only remains for us to see how Bourdieu understands this advance of the
universal, which he recounts in terms that combine Hegelianism (the
state as site of the realization of the universal) with Marxism (conflict as
the motor of history).
52. Bourdieu says that to interpret a historical process in terms of evolution amounts to freezing one state in a power relationship:
it is a way of intervening politically in the conjuncture. See Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 320.
54. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 387.
55. Ibid, 383sq.
56. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 179.
THE THEORY OF THE STATE AS THEORY

OF THE INTEGRATION OF THE DOMINATED:
A COMPROMISE BETWEEN HEGELIANISM AND MARXISM?
The study of the form in which the universal is realized is perhaps the
point at which Bourdieu’s confrontation with Marxism culminates: what
is in question here is the interpretation of the acquisition of rights by the
dominated in the misnamed welfare state or the more accurately named
social state (or social-national state).57 Bourdieu envisages the struggles
that advance the cause of the universal as integrative struggles: the dom-
inated acquire universal socially recognized rights within the framework
of the nation state. The history of the state can therefore be envisaged as
the history of the realization of the universal in the form of the progres-
sive acquisition of rights: civil rights (abolition of the société d’ordres, legal
equality), political rights (such as the right to vote), social rights (rights
to healthcare, to retirement: the “welfare state”). In each case the advance
of the universal takes the form of a new way of understanding equality
_ between citizens; more generally, it can be considered as a sequence of
step changes in the idea of citizenship.58 Acquisitions of social rights are
XII traditionally seen by Marxism as triumphs of the working class that result
_ from the class struggle of the dominated. Now, there is no subject upon
which Althusser and Bourdieu diverge more radically than this, with
Althusser representing, within Marxism, the rigor of a revolutionary line.
In the post-1976 debates on the PCF’s abandonment of the dictator-

ship of the proletariat, Althusser maintains the major theses of Leninism
on the state as machine for domination in the service of the interests of
the dominant class, and on the need to smash the state apparatus, not just
take it over. From this perspective, he interprets the state as a machine
endowed with legal power, which transforms the violence of class war
into law, legislation, and norms. He adds that law thus produced conse-
crates class domination “in and by the state, in that only the Force of the
dominant class enters into it and is recognized there.”59 From this clearly
anti-Hegelian perspective, social rights, the result of integrative strug-
gles, are perceived only as a means of ensuring the reproduction of class
domination, that is to say the maintenance of capitalist relations of pro-
duction. The dominating class may apparently abandon its short-term
economic interests, but its long-term political interests (which are also
economic) are preserved: the rights conceded within the power relation-
ship are only tactical concessions.
57. See Étienne Balibar, Droit de cité (Paris: PUF, 2002).

58. The model of the three steps of citizenship was first put forward in 1949 by Thomas Humphrey Marshall in his article “Citizenship
and social class.” See Balibar, Droit de cité, 55–6.
59. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 109.
Against this revolutionary perspective, Bourdieu maintains a more

Hegelian position, emphasizing the actual effects of universally recognized
rights for the dominated. If the class struggle has indeed been the motor
of the history of the state, the result of it has been the recognition of
workers’ rights and their incorporation into the constitutional order: “a
‘Marxist’ process in its modalities, but ‘Hegelian’ in its final result.”60
Thus, Bourdieu’s theory is not far from being a compromise position
between Hegelianism and Marxism, positioned between a theory of
integration and a theory of domination; Bourdieu himself would say,
however, that this compromise is but a reflection of the “double faced”
characteristics of the state itself:61 there can be no integration without
domination.
It is this integration of the dominated that lies at the heart of the
construction of the nation state:62 it will consist in an integration into
the “political game”—that is to say, citizenship. Bourdieu maintains that
the rights of man set out in the Declaration of 1789 are only truly real-
ized in the welfare state, which merely “fulfil[s] on one essential point, _
that is, the economic conditions of access to the rights of the citizen,
what was implicit already in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”63 XIII
It is at this point that Bourdieu comes back to a question that is not _
so far removed from Althusser’s perspective: If the rights acquired by
the dominated are concessions on the part of the dominant, this poses
the problem of knowing just how far these concessions can go without

calling the whole social order into question. It is this dilemma (how to
integrate the dominated, but without conceding too much) that the wel-
fare state “is the product of,”64 fueled by the ambivalent attitude of the
dominant in regard to the people: they fear them as a threat, but cannot
do without them. In Weber’s words, the construction of the state takes
place by “domesticating the dominated”: the nation-state is constructed
under threat of the “secession”65 or breaking away of the dominated
classes. Reflecting on the social order guaranteed by the state therefore
comes down to reflecting on the means of preventing or anticipating
disorder and secession. For the dominant, the prevention of disorder or
the ensuring of order is conceived of in terms of the management of
“two sets of relatively independent phenomena,” the “consequences of
60. Balibar, La Crainte des masses, 439.

61. Bourdieu, On the State, 97sq, 222, 226, 291.
62. Ibid., 359.
63. Ibid., 358.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 359.
the interdependences between dominant and dominated”66 and the dan-

gerous nature of the dominated.
The first element concerns what Foucault would call the state’s biopo-
litical tendency: the state insofar as it is responsible for managing a popu-
lation understood as a set of living beings. For the concept of population
is wider than that of social class: what surpass class divisions more than
anything else are epidemiological phenomena. Here Bourdieu bases him-
self on the works of the Dutch historian Abram de Swaan, “who studied
the role that major epidemics have played in the birth of the state.”67
Epidemics being inter-class phenomena, the diseases and microbes car-
ried by members of the dominated classes circulate throughout the whole
of urban space and constrain the dominant to take collective measures to
protect themselves. The state must construct a network of sewers to resolve
this problem. Because of the biological danger posed by the dominated
classes, state policy must gradually ensure universal conditions of well-
being, that is to say it must ensure conditions of public health. Biological
_ threat is combined with the social and political threat of the dominated.
The second element in the constitution of the nation-state under
XIV threat from the dominated is linked to the danger posed by the latter,
_ by way of riots and mass mobilizations, to “collective security and public
order.”68 Above all, the dominant want order: to conserve their “profits
from order” they are prepared to concede rights to the dominated who
may otherwise be tempted to secede. But inversely, the dominated them-

selves also benefit from certain “advantages of order” which explain, to a
great extent, a social tendency toward the maintenance of order.69 But it
is striking how Bourdieu is fascinated above all by the nineteenth-century
philanthropists who, having had the intuition that dominators and dom-
inated are interdependent, initiated a strategy of the concession of rights
to the dominated in “the logic of enlightened self-interest.”70
While Bourdieu tends to defend Hegel against Marx in his theory
of the advance of the universal, the reader may be troubled by one final
concern: What exactly is this universal whose advances are strictly subject
to respect for the enlightened self-interest of the dominant? The return of
Marxist suspicion seems inevitable here, bringing with it a last question
for Bourdieu: In what way is his theory of the dominant, which cannot
be reduced to a theory of domination in the various social fields, distinct
from a Marxist theory of the domination of the capitalist class? ■
66. Ibid., 359–60.

67. Ibid., 360.
68. Ibid.
Julien PALLOTTA, Graduate and Doctor in philosophy, attached to the doctoral school
of Erraphis (Université Toulouse—Jean Jaurès), teacher in the Rio de Janeiro French lycée, and
associate researcher at the laboratory of contemporary philosophy at the Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro (IFCS/UFRJ). His research concerns social philosophy and French politics in the 1960s
and 1970s, principally that of Louis Althusser and his collaborators, as well as philosophy of edu-
cation. Author of an article on Althusser and Godard in the collection edited by Patrice Maniglier,
Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France (Paris: PUF, 2011).
ABSTRACT
This article proposes to reexamine Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism, and more particu-
larly with Althusserian Marxism. It is suggested that Althusser may have functioned as a foil for
Bourdieu, especially in view of the similarities between the Althusserian theory of ideological
power and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power. The theory of the state is probably the most
appropriate ground on which to compare the two thinkers. The recent publication of Bourdieu’s
lectures on the state allows one to see how in his own historical sociology he elaborated a theory of
the state that was a response to Marxism: by responding to the Marxist critique of Hegel, Bourdieu
_
seeks to show that, since the dominant invoke the universal in order to legitimize their domination,
they can only ever be partially successful in doing so. Bourdieu ends up by conceding to Marxism XV
that the universal makes significant progress only in terms of the self-interested understanding of _
the universal proper to the dominant.
Keywords: Althusser, Bourdieu, state, symbolic capital, domination.

Bourdieu's Engagement With Althusserian Marxism: The Question of The State

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Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations

Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism was a vexed one, involving

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Actuel Marx / n° 58 / 2015: History and Class Struggle

themselves from him.6 This silent presence of Althusser in Bourdieu’s

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BOURDIEU’S CRITIQUE OF ALTHUSSER:

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9. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 66–68.

I am very much against the notion of apparatus, which

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a given field are in a position to make it function to their

Whereas the notion of the apparatus enters Althusser’s work from

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presenting a social world held together by an implacable dominance, no

THE THEORY OF THE STATE AS MONOPOLY

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It is the state, as “meta-field”30 or “meta-capital,”31 that enables power to

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any property (any form of capital whether physical,

It is by thus defining symbolic capital as the ultimate foundation

30. Ibid., 201.

inscribes himself in a tradition of French social philosophy beginning

stock of self-evidences shared by all, which, within the

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40. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 68.

critique of the theory of the state: Althusser denounces the ideas of

Those who—like Marx—invert the official image that

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interests in the universal, brings Bourdieu’s sociology of the state very

gives a particularly sharp edge to the legitimation antin-

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In virtue of the logic of the differentiation of fields and the constraint

THE THEORY OF THE STATE AS THEORY

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57. See Étienne Balibar, Droit de cité (Paris: PUF, 2002).

Against this revolutionary perspective, Bourdieu maintains a more

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60. Balibar, La Crainte des masses, 439.

the interdependences between dominant and dominated”66 and the dan-

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66. Ibid., 359–60.

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Actuel Marx / n° 58 / 2015: History and Class Struggle