The State Nobility Elite Schools in the Field of Power PIERRE BOURDIEU Translated by Lauretta C. Clough Polity PressOB] A530 English translation © Polity Press 1986. Foreword © Love]. D. Wacquant 1996, Trt published in Prance as La noblese d'état grandes oles es esprit, de corps © Les Editions de Minus 1989. ‘This Ganaation fist published 1996 by Polity Press in associsian with, Blaclowell Publishers Lc. Published withthe ssistance of the French Minscry of Culsre Eclorisl office: Press 65 Bridge Street (Cambridge C82 1UR, UK Marketing and production iaciwell Publishers Lee a 108 Cowley Ros Z Onfotd OX4 YE, UK 6 [Allsights reserved, Except for the quotation of short passages forthe purposes of eiicsm and ‘eviews no pat of this publication may be eproduced, stored in retrieval system, oF teansmited, in any form a: By any means, electronic, mechanical, phorocopying, recording or ‘iherwise without tke prior permission ofthe publisher, Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject the condition that i shall, fot by way of trade or otherwise, be lst, re-sol, hire out, or otherwise ciculated without he publishers prio eonsent in any lorm of binding cover other than shat in whichis published sd without sinilar condition sachading this condition being imposed on the [ubsequent purchaser. ISBN 0-7456-0824-8 [A CIP catalogue record fo this book is available fom the British Library “Typeset in 19.00 12p¢ Garamond Stempel by Weare, Boldon, Tyne and Wear tinted in Grex Betsin by TJ Press Lad, Padstow, Cornwall Contents Foreword by Loic J. D. Wacquant ‘Translator’s Note PROLOGUE. Social Structures and Mental Structures PARTI Academic Forms of Classification 1 Dualistic Thinking and che Conciliation of Opposites "The Disciplining of Minds The Privilege of Ease Academica Mediocritas 2. Misrecogaition and Symbolic Violence ‘A Cognitive Machine Peer Judgment and Academic Ethies ‘The Space of Possible Virtues Appendices 1 The Social Origins of Concours Général Prizewinners (1966-1986) 2. Election and Overselection 3 Prominent Themes from Two Prizewinning Essays 44 A Sketch of Four Prizewinners PART II The Ordination 1 The Production of a Nobility Forcing Ground and Intensive Cultivation Symbolic Confinement ‘A Dualist Organization 2 A Rite of Institution Consecrating ‘Those Who Consecrate Themselves Ascesis and Conversion Noblesse Oblige " 9 2B 30 32 41 47 54 7 60 6 m1 B at 92 9% 102 108 109 1‘vi Contents 3 The Ambiguities of Competence Appendix ‘Accounts of Life in Preparatory Classes and the Grandes Ecoles PART IL The Field of the Grandes Ecoles and its Transformations 1A State of the Structure "The Model Grande Porte an Petite Porte: Two Modes of Entry "The Space of the Grandes Holes: A Chiasmatic Structure [A Matrix of Preferences Positions, Dispositions, and Stances Esprit de Corps Deviant Trajectories 2. AStractural History Structural Variations and Structural Invariants Palace Wars Roundabout Routes and Sanctuary Schools Appendices 1 A Discourse of Celebration 2 On Method 3 Data Tables 4 Blindness PARTIV The Field of Power and its Transformations 1 Forms of Power and their Reproduction "The Structure of the Field of Power Strategies of Reproduction The Family Mode of Reproduction "The School-Mediated Mode of Reproduction Family Uses of the Schoo! 2 Establishment Schools and Power over the Economy State Bosses and Family Bosses “The Nobility of the Bourgeois Class” ‘The “Elite” "Trends and Struggles ‘The Privilege of the “Berobed” 3. Transformations in the Structure of the Field of Power Appendices 116 124 129 131 133 142 152 161 170 180 183 188 189 197 214 230 232 245, 255 261 263, 264 272 278 285 290 300 300 308 315 320 307 336 1. The Field of Economie Power in 1972 (Correspondence Analysis) 340 2 Positions in the Field and Political Stances 350 Contents 3 A Day inthe Life of a VIP 4 Elective Affinities, Instisutionalized Connections, and the Circulation of Information PART V State Power and Power over the State State Magic The “Berobed” and the Invention of the State ‘The Lengthening of the Circuits of Legitimation Translator’s Appendix Glossary Simplified Chart of che Current French Educational System Notes Index 356 360 371 374 377 382 390 390 393 394 458Foreword Loic J. D. Wacquant Of the manifold works by Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility is perhaps the most formidable and the most paradoxical, and no doubt for these very reasons likely to disconcert, if not confound, many of its foreign readers. First, itis at once doggedly Francocentric in empirical substance and scope, yet irrepressibly universalizing in analytical intent and reach. Second, and this is one of the hallmarks of Bourdieu’s sociological style, The State Nobility is resolutely empirical, data-laden to the point of saturation, yet animated by 2 forceful theoretical project that places it at the epicenter of debates over power, culture, and reason at century's end sn more so than Distinction, which it builds upon and extends in a number of directions,’ this study of the logic of social domination in advanced society, and of the mechanisms whereby it disguises and perpetu- ates itself, is anchored deep in the specificities of the French system of class, culture, and education in the two decades following the upheaval of May 68. ‘At the same time, as in every good ethnological report according to Marcel Mauss, “what may appear as futile detail is in fact a condensation of princi- ples” that Bourdicu contends are equally operative in other countries and epochs. 1 The first such principle is the vexing yet obdurate relationship of collision and collusion, autonomy and complicity, distance and dependence, between material and symbolic power. As Weber noted well, in every structure of domination, those “privileged through existing political, social, and eco- nomic orders” are never content to wield their power unvarnished and to impose their prerogatives naked. Rather, they “wish to sce their positions transformed {rom purely factual power relations into a cosmos of acquired rights, and to know that they are thus sanctified.”® In feudal society, the Church was the institution entrusted with transmuting the lord's might, founded as it was upon control of weaponry, land, and riches, into divinex Foreword right; ecclesiastical authority was deployed o justify and thereby solidify the rule of che new warrior class, In the complex sovietes spawned by ia capitalism, Bourdieu maintains, the school has taken over this work of sanc- tification of social divisions. So that not one but two species of capital now give access to positions of power, define the structure of social space, and govern the life chances and trajectories of groups and individuals: economic capital and cultural capital Credentials help define the contemporary social order, in the medieval sense of ordo, a set of gradations at once temporal and spiritual, mundane and celestial, which establish incommensurable degrees of worth among ‘women and men, not only by sorting and allocating them across the differ- ent slots that make up the social structure, but also, and more importantly, by presenting the resulting inequalities between them as ineluctable necessi- tes born of the talent, effort, and desire of individuals. This is because cul tural capital, though mainly accumulated and handed dowa in the family, appears to inhere in the person of its bearers. The fact that it “manages to combine the prestige of innate property with the merits of acquisition” makes it uniquely suited to legitimizing the continued inheritance of social privileges in societies smitten with the democratic ideal. Here Bourdieu’s object is the operation of social alchemy whereby a social hierarchy dis-simulates itself, to those it dignifics no less than to those it excludes, a sale of human exesllence how a historically arbitrary social order rooted in the materiality of economic and political power transmutes itself into what displays every outward appearance of an aristocracy of intelligence, Under this angle, the granting of an elite degree is not so much a “tite of passage” & la Van Gennep as a rite of institution’ i does not demarcate a before and an after so much as it differentiates ~ and elevates — those destined to occupy eminent social positions from those over whom they will lord. It evokes reverence for and consecrates them, in the strongest sense of the term, that is, it makes them sacred (anyone who has attended a commencement ceremony at 2 major British or American university cannot bbut be struck by their archaic religious feel chat would have delighted Robertson Smith). As the etymology of the word “credentials,” credentiais, giving authority (derived in turn from credere, to believe), testifies, the beszowal of a diploma is the climactic moment in a long cycle of production of collective faith in the legitimacy of a new form of class rule. " Indeed, much as the “generalization of the ceremony of dubbing” was, according to Mare Bloch, “the symptom of a profound transformation of the notion of knighthood” in the Middle Ages, Bourdieu argues that the generalization of educational titles as prerequisite for ascent to the apex of Foreword xi private corporations and public bureaucracies signals the consolidation of 2 new mode of domination and a corresponding transformation in the system of strategies whereby the ruling class maintains and masks itself, at the cost of swift and continual self-meramorphosis. In feudal society, the relation between the temporal and spiritual poles of power took the form of a relatively simple, dualistic yet complememtary, ‘opposition berween warriors and priests, military and hierocratic authority, wielders of swords and wielders of words. With the constitution of the for- tally rational state and the concurrent ascendancy of the "second capital” (the two, Bourdieu hypothesizes, are correlative historical inventions), this antagonistic couple is replaced by an immensely complex web of criss- crossing linkages among the multiplicity of fields in which the various forms of social power now effective circulate and concentrate. The chain of inter- dependencies that sews them together into this peculiar ensemble Bourdieu calls field of power (a notion introduced in the early 1970s but elaborated for the first time here both theoretically and empirically) extends from the economic field, at one end, to the feld of cultural production, at the other.’ Tadustralist and artist in the nineteenth century, manager and intelleezal in the swentieth are, in the case of France, the personifications of the dominant and the dominated poles of the field of power respectively. Between them, and in symmetric and inverse order according to the relasive preponderancy they accord to economic or cultural capital, are arrayed the fields of politics, higher civil service, the professions, and the university. ‘As species of capital diversify and autonomous ficlds multiply - two propositions which, for Bourdieu, are equivalent conceptual translations of the same epochal trend since capital and field mutually define and specify each other ~ and as the more transparent “mechanical solidarity” between weakly differentiated and interchangeable powers gives way to the more intricate “organic solidarity” between highly distinct and disparate powers, tensions mount and clashes threaten to break out. For the fact that varie- gated forms of capital now enter imo the formula of domination implies that different principles of social primacy and legitimacy must be reckoned with and reconciled, The field of power is precisely this arena where holders of the various kinds of capital compete over which of them will prevail. At stake in these struggles amongst the dominant (oft mistaken for confronta- tions between ruling and subordinate classes) is the relative value and potency of rival kinds of capital, asset in particular by the going “exchange rate” between economic and cultural currencies. This is where the system of elite establishments of higher education enters the picture. In societies characterized by the copresence and contest of diverse forms of power that all rely increasingly upon conversion into cre- dentials as a means for self-perpetuation, this system not only guarantees preferential and speedy access to positions of command to the sons of those lineages who already monopolize them (full membership in the nobility,xit Foreword whether based on blood or diplomas, is essentially a male affair), Its high degree of autonomy and internal differentiation according to the same antinomy between money and culture that organizes the field of power at large enables it also to defuse intranecine conflicts by recognizing and rewarding diverse claims to scholastic, and thence social, excellence. “Intellectual schools” such as Ecole Normale Supérieure, the scedbed of France's high intelligentsia (Bourdieu is one in a long string of distinguished alumni), draw and honor mainly those students who are most strongly aucracted to them in the first place because their dispositions are living ‘embodiments of the kind of eapital these schools demand and valorize, vir children originating from the cultured fractions of the bourgeoisie to which they promptly return. Establishments geared to grooming captains of industry and state, such as Ecole des Hautes Frudes Commerciales and Ecole Polyzechnique, on the other hand, are primarily the preserve of stu dents issued from, and destined for, the economically rich fractions of the French haute bourgeoisie. Situated at midpoint between the two poles of the space of French elite schools, the Ecole Nationale d’ Administration, from which cabinet members and high eivil servants hail, mingles the two kinds of competencies, culeural and economic, and recruits students whose farnily patrimony typically cumulates rare credentials and old wealth, By providing separate pathways of transmission of privilege and by recognizing competing, even antagonistic, claims to preeminence within its own order, the field of elite schools insulates and placates the various cate- gories of inheritors of power and ensures, better than any other device, the pax dominoram indispensable to the sharing of the spoils of hegemony. Hence itis not this or that establishment but the field (that is, the space of ‘objective relations) they compose that contributes qua field to the repro- duction of the evolving matrix of patterned differences and distances consti- tutive of the social order. The immediate, concrete, abject of The State Nobility is the structure and functioning of the uppermost tier of Ecance’s system of higher education and its linkages to this country’s bourgeoisie and top corporations. Its deeper, theoretic, aim is to elaborate, in the very movement whereby it displays empirically one of its historical instant tions, a model of the social division of the labor of domination that obtains in advanced societies where a diversity of forms of power coexist and vie for supremacy. mH Its extreme centralization and high social selectivity, rooted in longstanding ties between class cleavages, state building, republicanism, and education and in the bifurcation between university and grandes écoles, the eagerness with which it sanctifies worldly (that is, bourgeois) cultural baggage and the Foreword xiii corresponding brutality with which it devalues its own products as “sco- laires,” all make France’s system of higher learning a propitious terrain upon which to expose the surreptitious correlation of academic with social classification and the Janus-faced nexus of connivance-through-conflict between the two poles of the field of power. The specificity of the cal materials, however, should not detract from the wider applicability of the analytic framework employed to process them. Properly construed, The State Nobility offers a systematic research program on any national field of power, provided that the American (British, Japanese, Brazilian, etc.) reader carries out the work of transposition necessary to generate, by way of homological reasoning, an organized set of hypotheses for comparative inguiry in her own country.’ Bourdieu holds that the chiasmatic organization of the contemporary rul- ing class, expressive of a historical state of the division of labor between ‘material (economic) and symbolic (cultural) eapital,’ and its projection onto the field of elite schools that both disengages and entwines the two, is char- acteristic of all advanced societies. But this subterranean structure of oppo- sition takes on phenomenally diverse forms in different countries, depending on a number of intersecting factors, including the historical tra- jectory of (upper) class formation, state structures, and the shape of the sys- tem of education in the society and time under consideration. Similarly, Bourdieu proposes that the rise of the “new capital” translates everywhere into a shift in modes of reproduction, from direct reproduction, where power is transmitted essentially within the family via economic property, to school-mediated reproduction, where the bequeathal of privilege is simulta- neously effectuated and transfigured by the intercession of educational instivutions. But, again, all ruling classes resort to both modes conjointly (Bourdieu takes pain to stress that the growing relative weight of cultural capital in no way effaces the ability of economic capital to propagate itself autonomically) and their partial preference for one or the other will depend fon the full system of instraments of reproduction at their disposal and on the current balance of power becween the various fractions tied to this or that mode of transmitt I: follows that it would be a mistake ~ Alfred North Whitchead called it the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” ~ to look for one-to-one corres- pondences across national boundaries between the institutions entrusted ‘with perpetuating the network of power positions in different societies (for instance, to seek an exact American or British counterpart to the Ecole Nationale d? Administration, for which there is none). Rather, one must, applying the relational mode of thinking encapsulated by the notion of field, set out in each particular case to uncover empirically the specific con- figurations assumed by the complexus of oppositions that structure social space, the system of education, and the field of power, as well as their inter- smpiri-xiv Foreword To illustrate summarily, the structure of the space of elite education tums, in the French instance, on a sharp horizontal dualism between grandes écoles (select graduate schools based on a numerus clausus, special preparatory classes, and national competitive entrance examinations, with direct pathways to high-profile jobs) and university (mass institutions open to all those who complete their secondary cursus and only loosely connect- ed to the occupational world) and, within the field of grandes écoles itself, between, along one axis, major and minor schools and, along the other, establishments. oriented’ toward intellectual values and establishments grooming for economic-political positions. In the decentralized American system of education, these dualities are refracted into a whole series of nest- ed oppositions, vertical as well as horizontal: between private and public sectors (starting at the level of secondary schooling), between community colleges and four-year universities, and between the great mass of tertiary educational institutions and 2 handful of elite establishments (anchored by the Ivy League) that arrogate the lion’s share of command posts in private and public affairs alike."" Due to the deep-rooted historic preponderancy of economic over cultural capital, the opposition between the two poles of power, and between the corresponding fractions of the American dominant class, does not materialize itself in the form of rival tracks or schools. It is projected instead within each (elite) university in the adversative and ten- sionful relations between the graduate division of arts and sciences, on the one side, and professional schools (especially law, medicine, and business) oon the other, as well as in the antipodean relations these entertain with the powers-that-be and in the contrasted images of knowledge they appeal to (research versus service, critique versus expertise, creativity versus utility, ete,), Yet, for all the differences in their respective systemic location and cir- cuitry, the tightly integrated network of Ivy League universities and private boarding schools functions as a close, if partial, analogue to the French device of grandes éoles ancl their associated classes préparatoires. Since the “mere assertion that clite schools exist, especially socially elite schools, goes against the American grain,” it is perhaps not superfluous to recall briefly just how exclusive — and exclusionary — the latter are. Suffice it to note that vvietualy all graduates of the top US boarding schools (who comprise 1 per- cent of American high school enrollment) enter college, compared to 76 percent of students from Catholic and other private schools, and 45 percent of all public school seniors, These super-privileged students, nine in ten of whom are children of professionals and business managers (two-thirds of their fathers and one-third of their mothers attended graduate or profes- sional school) are also much more likely to land on the most prized cam- puses, even controlling for scholastic aptitude scores: in 1982, nearly half of graduating “preppies” applied to Ivy League schools and 42 percent of those applicants were admitted, as against 26 percent of all candidates Foreword xv nationwide (though the latter are drawn from the country’s top 4 percent of, students), thanks to close organizational ties and active recruiting funnels between hoarding schools and high status private colleges.” In 1984, a mere 13 elite boarding schools were found to have educated 10 percent of the board members of large US companies and nearly one-fifth, of directors of two major firms, as compounding exclusive college degrees with upper-class pedigree multiplies the probability of joining the “inner circle” of corporate power. Among senior managers, possession of presti- gious educational credentials interacts with high class origins to decide who will bocome chief executive, serve on the boards of outside firms, and enter the leadership of major business associations. And just as in France diplo- ‘mas sanctioning “generalized bureaucratic culture” tend to supersede cer- tificates of technical proficiency, in the United States a top law degree or a bachelor’s degree from a select private college gives a manager 2 greater chance of reaching the vertex of responsibility in the corporate world than a master’s degree from a high-ranking MBA program."* Graduates of elite boarding schools and universities coming from well- to-do families listed in the Social Register are also massively overrepresented in the upper reaches of the American state (including the cabinet, the judi ciary, and government advisory boards), political personnel, high-priced law firms, the national media, philanthropic organizations, and the arts.* ‘And those who emerge out of the prep crucible to become “‘powerbrokers” in Boston, Washington, and Los Angeles feel no less entitled ro theie posi- tions and prerogatives than their counterparts from the rue Saint-Guillaume in Pas. Vv Distinguishing the (specific) empirical findings from the (general) theoretical model contained in The State Nobility suggests an agenda for a comparative, genetic and structural sociology of national fields of power that would, for each society, catalog efficient forms of capital, specify the social and historical determinants of their degrees of differentiation, distance, and antagonism, and evaluate the part played by the system of elite schools (or functionally equivalent institutions) in regulating the relations they enter tain. Such an inquiry would no doubt confirm that the greater opacity of the school-mediated mode of reproduction, and thus its improved capacicy to dissimulate the perpetuation of power, comes at a real price, First, it becomes more and more costly to be an inheritor: elite schools everywhere typically subject their students to stringent work regimens, austere lifestyles, and practices of intellectual and social mortification that entail significant personal sacrifice. Second, the stochastic logic which nowxvi Foreword governs the transmission of privilege is such that, while he enjoys every possible advantage from the start, not every son of chief executive, surgeon, ‘or scientist is assured of attaining a comparably eminent social position at the finish of the race." The specific contradiction of the school-mediated mode of reproduction resides precisely in the disjunction it creates between the collective interest of the class that the field of elite schools safeguards and the interes: of those of its individual members it must inevitably forfeit todoso. Bourdieu submits that the (limited) downward mobility of a contingent of upper-class youths and the transversal, “deviant trajectories” that take a umber of them from one pole of the field of power to the other ~ as when offspring from the cultured fractions of the bourgeoisie accede to posts of corporate or political responsibility — are powerful sources of change within the field of power as well as major tributaries to the “new social move- ments” that have flourished in the age of universal academic competition. At any ate, not all heiss are, under this regime, both capable and desirous of shouldering the burdens of succession. ‘This means that, to realize itself fully, a gencrative sociology of the mani- fold logics of power cannot limit itself to drawing an objectivist topology of distributions of capital. It must encompass within itself this “special chology” that Durkheim called for but never delivered.” Ie must, that 2 full account of the social genesis and implementation of the categories of thought and action through which the participants in the various social worlds under investigation come to perceive and actualize (or not) the potentialities they harbor. For Bourdieu, such dissection of the practical ‘cognition of individuals is indispensable because social strategies are never determined unilaterally by the objective constraints of the structure any more than they are by the subjective intentions of the agent, Rather, prac tice is engendered in the mutual solicitation of position and disposition, in the now-harmonious, now-discordant encounter between “social structures and mental structures,” history “objectified” as fields and history “embod- ied” in the form of this socially patterned matrix of preferences and propen- sities that constitute habitus." This is why The State Nobility opens with an analysis of the practical taxonomies and activities through which teachers and students jointly pro- duce the everyday reality of French elite schools as a meaningful Lebenswelt, In part I (chapter 2; “ Misrecognition and Symbolic Violence”), Bourdicu takes us inside the mind of the philosophy professor of the Ecole Normale Supérieure so that we may learn how to think, feel, and judge like fone and hence grasp from within, as it were, the obviousness of the uml cal = yet continually denied ~ relation between academic excellence and class distinction. And in part II (“The Ordination”), he reconstructs with painstaking precision and pathos the quasi-magical operations of segrega- tion and aggregation whereby the scholastic nobility is unified in body cum giv Foreword xvii soul and infused with the utmost certitude of the justness of its social mi hhe thorough (re)making of the self involved in the fabrication of the habitus of the dominant reveals how power insinuates itself by shaping minds and moulding desire from within, no less than through the “dull compulsion” of material conditions from without. Far from resolving itself in the mechanical interplay of homological struc~ tures (and of second-order correspondences berween homologies operating at different levels of the field of power and its constituent subfields), Bourdieu is able to show that domination arises in and through that particu- lar relation of im-mediate and infraconscious “fit” between structure and agent that obtains whenever individuals construct the social world through principles of cision that, having emerged from that world, are patterned after its objective divisions, ‘Thus he can affirm at one and the same time, and without contradiction, that social agents are fully determined and fully determinative (thereby dissolving the scholastic alternative between struc- ture and agency), Paraphrasing Marx’s famous formula, one might say that, for Bourdieu, ‘men and women make their own history but they do not make it through categories of their own choosing. And we may also say without succumbing to idealism that social order is, at bottom, a gnoseological order, provided that we concurrently recognize that the cognitive schemata through which wwe know, interpret, and actively assemble our world are themselves social constructs that transcribe within individual bodies the constraints and facili- tations of their originative milieu. a ‘One might be puzzled by the fact that official state structures, policies, and personnel ~ the stock-in-trade of conventional sociologies of the state hardly turn up in the present book. This deliberate absence is meant to dra- matize one of Bourdieu’s key arguments: that the state is not necessarily where we look for it (that is, where it silently instructs us to east our gaze and net), or, more accurately, that its efficacy and elfects may be strongest precisely where and when we neither expect nor suspect them.” For Bourdieu, the differentia of the state as an organization born of and geared toward the concentration of power(s) docs not lie where materialist theories from Max Weber to Norbert Elias to Charles Tilly typically place it We remain overly wedded to the (eighteenth-century) view of the state as “revenue collecror and recruiting sergeant” when we sce in it that agency which successfully monopolizes legitimate physical violence and neglect to notice alongside that it also, and more decisively, monopolizes legitimate symbolic violence.® The state, Pierre Bourdieu intimates, is first and foremost the “central bank of symbolic credit” which endorses all cts of nominationxviii Foreword whereby social divisions and dignities are assigned and proclaimed, that is, promulgated as universally valid within the purview of a given territory and population. And the academic title is the paradigmatic manifestation of this “state magic” whereby social identities and destinies are manufactured under cover of being recorded, social and technical competency fused, and ‘exorbitant privileges transmuted into rightful dues. ‘The violence of the state, chen, is not exercised solely (or even mainly) upon the subaltern, the mad, the sick, and the criminal. Ie bears upon us all, in a myriad minute and invisible ways, every time we perceive and construct the social world through categories instilled in us via our education, The state is not only “out there,” in the form of bureaucracies, authorities, and ceremonies, It is also “in here,” inelfaceably engraved within us, lodged in the intimacy of our being in the shared manners in which we feel, think, and judge. Not the army, the asylum, the hospital, and the jail, but the school is the state’s most potent conduit and servant, Durkheim was in the right when, as the good Kantian that he was, he described the state as a “social brain” whose “essential function is to think,” a “special organ entrusted with elaborating definite representations valid for the collectivity.” Except that these representations, Bourdieu insists, are those of a class-divided society, not a unified and harmonious social organism, and their acceptance is the product of stealthy imposition, not spontaneous consentancity. Unlike totemie myths, the “scholastic forms of classification” that provide the basis for the logical integration of advanced nation-states are class ideologies that serve particular interests in the very movement whereby they portray them as universal. The instru ments of knowledge and construction of social reality diffused and inculeat- ed by the school are also, and inescapably, instruments of symbolic domination. And thus it is that the credential-based nobility owes the fidelity we grant it, in the twofold sense of submission and belief, to the fact that the “frameworks of interpretations” that the state forges and forces upon us through the school are, to borrow another expression of Kenneth Burke's, so many “acceptance frames” that make us gently bow under a yoke we do not even feel. VI In offering, first, an anatomy of the production of the new capital and, sec~ ‘ond, an analysis of the social effects of its circulation in the various fields that partake in the travail of domination, The State Nobility reveals Bourdieu’s sociology “of education” for what it teuly is, and has been from its inception: a generative anthropology of powers focused on the special contribution that symbolic forms bring to their operation, conversion, and naturalization. Much as the founding triumvirate of classical sociology was Foreword xix preoccupied with religion as the opium, moral glue, and theodicy of nascent capitalist modernity, Bourdieu’s abiding interest in the school stems from the role he assigns it as guarantor of the contemporary social order via the state magic that consecrates social divisions by inseribing them simultane- ously in the objectivity of material distributions and in the subjectivity of cognitive classifications. Weber’s warning that “patents of education will create a privileged ‘caste’” has proved prescient: the technocrats who head today’s capitalist firms and government offices have at their disposal a panoply of powers and titles - of property, education, and ancestry — without historical precedent. ‘They need not choose between birth and merit, ascription and achievement, inheritance and effort, the aura of tradition and the efficiency of modernity, because they can embrace them all. And yet, Bourdieu’s sober diagnosis of the advent of the state nobility does not condemn us to cynicism and pas- sivity, or to the fake radicalism of the rhetorie of the “politics of culture.” For the relative autonomy that symbolic power must of necessity enjoy to fulfill is legitimizing function always entails the possibility ofits diversion in the service of aims other than reproduction. This is especially true when the “chain of legitimation” grows ever more extended and intricate, and ‘when domination is wielded in the name of reason, universality, and the common weal. Reason, Bourdieu argues in pushing historicise rationalism to is limit, i neither a Nietzschean illusionist’s trick fueled by the “will to power,” nor an anthropological invariant rooted in the immanent structure of human communication as with Habermas, but a potent if frail historical invention born of the multiplication of those social microcosms, such as the fields of science, art, law, and politics, in which universal values may be realized, albeit imperfectly. That an ever greater number of protagonists in the game of domination find it necessary to concoct rational justifications for their actions increases the chance that they will, paradoxically, foster in spite of themselves the forward march of reason. To play with universality is to play with fire. And the collective role of intellectuals as bearers of the “corporatism of the universal” is to compel ‘temporal powers to live up to, and enforce upon each other, the very norms of reason they invoke, however hypocritically, This puts science — and social science in particular — at the epicenter of the struggles of our age. For the more science is summoned by the dominant on behalf of their rule, the more vital it is for the dominated to avail themselves of its results and instruments, Such is the political meaning and purpose of The State Nobility: to contribute to this rational knowledge of domination which, non obstante the jaded jeremiads of postmodernist prophets, remains our best ‘weapon against the rationalization of domination. Berkeley, February 1995xx Foreword Notes to Foreword 1 10 ut Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Crtigne of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) Marcel Mauss,” Manuel d'ethnograpbie (1947; 3rd edn, Paris: BibliothEque Payot, 1989), p. 7 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson (ed), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Fducation (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 245. This article is a condensation of Bourdieu’s generalized the- cry of capital, including the later’s basic forms, their respective properties and mechanisms of conversion, and the specificities of cultural capital Pierre Bourdieu, "Rites of Institution,” in Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Peter Collier (1982; Cambridge: Polity Press; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 117-27. Mare Bloch, La société féodale (1930; Paris: Aibin Michel, 1968), p. 437 Pierre Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir, champ intllectue! et habitus de classe,” Scolies 1 (1971), pp. 7-26; the more general concept of field (champ) is discussed synthetically in “Some Properties of Fields,” in Sociology in Question, trans Richard Nice (1980; London and Newbury Park: Sage, 1993}: for cl and exemplary illustrations, see The Field of Cultural Production, srans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press; New York: Columbia University Press 1993), For a germane discussion of the seducements of ideographic reduction with regard to Bourdicu’s analysis of the French university field, see Loic J. D. Wacquant, “Sociology as Socio’Analysis: Tales of “Homo Academicus’.” Sociological Forum 3 (Winter 1980), pp. 677-89. ‘The historical constitution of the opposition between “money” and “art” in sineteenth-cenrury Trance if retraced in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: New American Library, 1948), p. 52. On these cleavages, ses, respectively, Tra Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1987), esp. pp. 208-21; Barbara Falsey and Barbara Heynsy "The College Channel: Private and Publi Schools Reconsidered,” Sociology of Education 57 (Apr. 1984), pp. 111-22; Peer W, Cookson Jr and Caroline Hodges Persell, Preparing for Power: America's Flite Boarding Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Coramunity Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in “Ameria, 1950-1983 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ‘Wiliam Kingston Powell and Lionel S. Lewis (eds), High Status Track: Studies of Elite Schools and Strasication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) 16 2 Foreword xxi Cookson and Petsell, Preparing fer Power, p. 15. The Figures that follow are also excerpted from this excellent study, ch. 3. Caroline Hodges Persell and Pecer W. Cookson Jr, “Charting and Bartering: Elite Education and Social Reproduction,” Soaial Problems 33 (Dec. 1985), pp. 114-29. ‘Michael Uscem and Jerome Karabel, “Educational Pathways to ‘Top Corporate Management,” American Sociological Review 51 (Apr. 198), pp. 184-200 Michael Useem, Tbe Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Cookson and Persell, Preparing for Power, pp. 198-202; Michael Schwartz (ed,), The Structure of Power in America: The Conporate Elite as Ruling Class (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987); George F. Marcus, ives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York and Berlin: Aldine, 1993}; Steven B. Levine, “The Rise of ‘American Boarding Schools and the Development of a National Upper Class.” Social Problems 28 (Apr. 1980), pp. 63-54; and, for a historical perspective, E. Dighy Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (1958; New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1989). Tt should further be noted that bons fide membership in the American feld of power via elite edu- ‘ation continues to be restricted to the white caste (cf. Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G, William Domhoff, Blacks in the White Establishment? A Study of Race send Class in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) ‘Cookson and Persell stress that the “ft between boarding school attendance and admission to elite eirles” is anything but perfec (Preparing for Power, 1p. 204.) and indicate that childcen from the American raling clas ae increas” ingly unwilling to endure the self-denial, isolation, psychic pain, and severe all- around life asceticism that bequcathal of power henceforth requires. Not a few ‘of them abandon prep school (or are expelled), try to commit suicide, or simply ‘opt to pursue other, less censorious avocations “We bold that sociology has not completely achieved its task so long as it has ‘not penetrated into the innermost mind [le for intriewr) of the individeal in onder to relate the instiutions ic sceks to explain to their psychological condi sions’ (Emile Durkheim, “Sociologie rcligieuse et théorie de la connaissance,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 17 (1909), p. 733). For a fuller discussion of the two-way relationship between habitus and field, sce Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Waequant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chieago Press; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 12-19 and 97-140. In this, Bourdicn agrees with the late Philip Abrams, who pointed out (in “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” fournal of Historical Sociology 11 (1988), pp. 58-89) that one of the main obstacles tothe sociology of the state resides inthe special ability it has vo secrete its own power: Pierre Bourdicu, “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Buremratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12: 1 (Mer. 1994), pp. 1-19. Indecd, ‘ome might argue that the state rmust have captured a great deal of symbolic power fi is ever to establish the legitimacy of ts use of force.xxii Foreword 21 Emile Durkheim, “Definition de MEtas,” in Legons de sociologie (Pass Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), pp. 89 and 87. 22 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History (1937: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 23. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Scholastic Point of View,” Culteral Anthropology 5 (Nov. 1990), pp. 380-91; and Raisons pratigues. Sr la vbéorie de Vaction (Pars: Seuil, 1994), “Un acte désintéresé estil possible” esp. pp. 161-7. For rwo stimulating interpretations of Bourdieu’s proposed “thisd way” between mod- ist rationalism and postmodern relativism, see Craig Calhoun, “Habitus, Field, and Capieal: Historical Specificity in the Theory of Practice,” in his 1 Social Theory: Culeure, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 132-61: and Paul Raymond Harrison, “Bourdieu and the Possibility of a Postmodern Sociology,” Thesis Eleven 35 (1993), pp. 36-50. Translator’s Note Asa satisfying understanding of this text rests on some knowledge of the French educational system and the organization of the French state, those readers unfamiliar with either will no doubt want to avail themselves of descriptive material as a complement to their reading. To help further T have provided an extra appendix containing a glossary and a simplified chart of the current educational system, This book is and is not about men, and its pronouns do and do not include women. I have tried to minimize the masculine effect, using femi- nine pronouns at times (but not “his or her” ete.), altering singular human subjects to the plural “they” when it seemed to make only a superficial dif- ference, using “children” rather than “sons” in many instances when daughters may be included, and choosing plural pronouns in cases of indefi- nites such as “someone,” “a person,” etc. It should be noted that the French professeur can be used for both sec- ondary school teachers and professors in higher education, with instituteur designating primary school teachers. When professeur is being tsed to mean all orany non-primary rank of educator, T have used the general term teacher, and it should thus be understood to include those in higher education. The word cadre deserves special note as wel, as it designates a category of profes- sional that can be variably but not exactly rendered by a few terms in English (manager, executive, corporate professional, professional staff). Readers will ‘want to adopt a broad sense of categorization when encountering these terms. To avoid misreadings of culturally nonequivalent terms designating social classes, phrases such as “lower and middle ranges of the social scale" have been used in place of “lower class” or “middle class,” et. ‘The epigraph to the book has been kept in French, but there is a gloss at the beginning of the notes on p. 394, Thave been fortunate to be able to call on the following generous individuals for information and discussion: Ann Bone, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Brown, Judith Clough, Nathalie Debrauwere, Manuel Diaz, Joy Esterlitz, Bernard Fronsacg, Madeleine Cottonet Hage, Claude Holmes, Pierre Mounier, Daniel Schubert, Laurence Schumann, Joe ©. Smith, Pierre Verdaguer, Loicxxiv Translator’s Note ‘Wacquant, and especially Joseph Brami, whose gift of time a critical eye, and an encouraging spirit was invaluable, Others in the departments of French and Italian, history, and philosophy at the University of Maryland and the French Embassy of Washington also gave of their time and expertise. am particularly indebted to the women who took care of the children, especially Judich Clough. ‘A beaux deniers comptants, des enfants anoblis Du collage, en un seut, volent aux fleurs dels. La sifflant, chantant, pensant lears maitresses, Cuirasseés d'ignorance et fers de leurs richesses, Ces Catons de vingeans vont & core, travers, Décider sans appel des inéréts divers. Le Pot aux roses découvert, ou le Parlement dévoil, 1789PROLOGUE Social Structures and Mental Structures In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the “mechanisms” that tend to ensure thefr repro~ duction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of objective structures is at one and the same time an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus struc- tured, Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world — especially the division into dominant and dominated in the different fields ~ and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. Although these two approaches, which we might characterize as “struc~ turalist” and “constructivist,” are from a theoretical standpoint inseparable, the demands of research mean that precedence has to be given cither to exploring objective structures (as in the third part of the present work), o:, on the other hand, to analyzing the cognitive structures that agents invest in the actions and representations through which they construct social reality and negotiate the very conditions under which their communicative exchanges take place (as in the first part’). But the analysis of structures and “mechanisms” acquires its full explanatory power and descriptive truth only because it includes the results of the analysis of schemata of percep. sion, appreciation, and actions that agents ~ students as well as teachers make use of in their judgments and practices. Tithe educational institution resembles something like an immense cogni- tive machine which continually redistributes students submitted to its examination according to their previous positions in the system of distribu- tions, its classificatory action is in reality only the outcome of thousands of actions and effects produced by agents who themselves act like so many yet objectively orchestrated, cognitive machines. Conversely, Of the acts of construction performed by agents, in their repre sentations as much as in their practices, can only become fully meaningful if2 Prologue it also sets itself the task of grasping the social genesis of the cognitive struc: tures that agents implement in them. In so doing, and despite the fact that it also aims to grasp the a priori social forms of subjective experience, this analysis distinguishes itself from all the types of analysis of essence that the ethnomethodologists are bringing back into vogue under more or less revamped guises. While it is no doubt true that agents construct social reali- ty and enter into struggles and transactions aimed at imposing theie vision, they always do so with points of view, interests, and principles of vision determined by the position they occupy in the very world they intend to transform or preserve. The fundamental structures of the socially constitut- ed preference systems that form the generating and unifying principle of making choices, whether with regard to educational institutions, disciplines, sports, culture, or political opinions, can be linked by an intelligible relation to objective divisions of social space — such as those that obtain, in the case of students from the grandes écoles,” in matters of economic or cultural capital, between the two poles of the field of power. ‘Anthropology is not a social physics, but neither can it be reduced to a phenomenology or a semiology. The use of statisties enables it to bring to light processes such as those that lead to the differential climination of stu- dents from different backgrounds, processes that exhibit such regularity in their complexity that one might be tempted to use mechanistic metaphors to describe them. In fact, what is at stake in the social world is not inert and interchangeable particles of matter, but agents who, being both discernible and endowed with the ability 10 discern, perform the innumerable opera- tions of ordination through which the social order is continuously repro- duced and transformed. But neither are they beings who are fully conscious of what they are doing. The discernment at the basis of both elassificatory acts and their products ~ that is, of practices, discourses, or works that are different and thus discernible and classifiable — is not the intellectual act of a consciousness explicitly positing its ends in a deliberate choice among a set of possible alzernatives constituted as such by a project. Rather, it is the practical operation of habitus, that is, generative schemata of classifications and classifiable practices chat function in practice without acceding to explicit representation and that are the product of the embodiment, in the form of dispositions, of a differential position in social space defined pre- cisely, as Suawson would have it, by the reciprocal externality of positions. Given that habitus is genetically (as well as structurally) linked to a posi- tion, it always tends to express, through schemata that are its embodied form, both the space of the different or opposed positions constitutive of social space (for example, top/bottom) and a practical stance toward this space (something like “I'm at the top or the bottom and I'd better stay here”), Its tendency to perpetuate itself according to its internal determina- tion, its conatus, by asserting its autonomy in relation to the situation (cather than submitting itself to the external determination of the environ- Social Structures and Mental Structures 3 ‘ment, as matter does), is a tendency to perpetuate an identity that is differ- ence. Habicus is thus at the basis of strategies of reproduction that rend to maintain separations, distances, and relations of order(ing), hence concur- ring in practice (although not consciously or deliberately) in reproducing the entire system of differences constitutive of the social order. The double reading that social realty calls for thus implies a double break. with unilateral approaches whose shortcomings are never as manifest as when it comes to analyzing forms of power, such as those of the educational system, that are only wielded with the active’ complicity of those who impose or submit to them.’ We cannot understand the symbolic violence of what were once hastily designated as the “ideological state apparatuses” unless we analyze in detail the relasionship between the objective character istics of the organizations that exercise it and the socially constituted dispo- sitions of the agents upon whom it is exercised. The miracle of symbolic efficacy evaporates when we realize that this truly magical action of influ- ence or ~ the word is not too strong ~ possession succeeds only insofar as the one who submits to it contributes to its efficacy; and that it does not con~ strain her unless she is predisposed by prior experience to recognize it. This only truly happens when the categories of perception and action that she pputs into practice in the individual acts through which the “will” and the power of the institution are accomplished, whether this be a teacher’s grad~ ing of an assignment or a student's preference for a given educational insti- tution or discipline, are in direct conformity with the objective structures of the organization because they are the product of the embodiment of these structures Throughout this book we will encounter many of these possessed indi- viduals who perform the institution’s every wish because they are the insti- tution made man (or woman), and who, whether dominated or dominant, can submit to it or fully exercise its necessity only because they have incor- porated it, they are of one body with it, they give body to it. Faced with those different forms of possession, science has a owofold and seemingly contradictory task, Against the initial tendency to take all the passions whose manifestations it observes for granted because they are in the order of things, science must assert their arbitrary, unjustifiable, and, if you will, pathological character. This sometimes requires it to use a distancing rhetoric, often mistaken for the mere eritical mood of ordinary polemics, in order to break the doxic adhesion to ordinary evidence. But it must also account for the passions, founded upon illusio, the investment in the game, that are engendered in the relationship between a habitus and the field to which it is adjusted; it must restore to these passions theic raison d’éire, their necessity, and thus tear them away from the guilt and absurdity to which they are doomed when they are treated as the choices of a relin- quished freedom, alienating itself in its voluntary submission to the fascina- tion of power. Social science thus discards the simplistic alternative4 Prologue between, on the one hand, the “centralist” vision, which sees “ideological apparatuses,” invested with a sovereign power of symbolic coercion, as the ‘mechanism behind all alienated actions and representations; and, on the other hand, the vision we might call “spontaneist”, which, ina simple rever- sal of the former, inscribes in each dominated individual the principle of an unnecessary submission to the constraints, the injunctions, or the seduc- tions of power — a submission sometimes described in the language of “vol- tuntary servitude” (“power comes from below”) If itis fitting to recall that the dominated always contribute to their own domination, itis at once necessary to recall that the dispositions that incline them toward this complicity are themselves the effect, embodied, of domi- nation, AAs are those dispositions, by the way, that mean that, in the words of Marx, “the dominant are dominated by their domination.” Symbolic vio- lence is that particular form of constraint that can only be implemented with the active complicity ~ which does not mean that it is conscious and voluntary of chose who submit to it and are determined only insofar as. they deprive themselves of the possibility of a freedom founded on the awakening of consciousness.’ This tacitly accepted constraint is necessarily implemented whenever objective structures encounter the mental structures that are in agreement with them. It is on the basis of the originary complici- ty between cognitive structures and the objective structures of which they are the product that the absolute and immediate submission which chars terizes the doxic experience of the native world is established. In this pre- dictable world, everything can be taken for granted because the immanent tendencies of the established order continuously appear in advance of the expectations spontaneously inclined to anticipate them, ‘We shall see that this analysis also applies to agents engaged in the univer- sity field, almost inevitably including those who, in writing about power ~if not about “voluntary servitude” ~ spontaneously think of themselves as exceptions to their own analyses. They unknowingly contribute to exercis- ing the symbolic domination that is exercised upon them, that is, upon their unconscious, insofar, and only insofar, as their mental structures objectively conform to the social structures of the microcosm in which their specie interests are formed and invested ~ in and through this very conformity Given the homologous relationship that binds them to the structures of social space, the hierarchies organizing academic space, such as those among, disciplines, tracks [sections],* and establishments, are the active mediation through which the hierarchies inscribed in the objectivity of social struc- tures become effective, particularly when these hierarchies function in an embodied state in the form of (formally neutral) principles of hierarchiza: tion of academic producers and products. As long as the principles orienting practices remain unconscious, the interactions of ordinary existence are, as Marx put it, “relations between men mediated by things.” Between the judge and the judged, in the form of the unconscious of the “subject” of the Social Structures and Mental Structures 5 judgment, there intervenes the structure of the distribution of economic and cultural capital and the principles of perception and appreciation that arc its transformed form. ‘Thus the sociology of education is a chapter, and not a minor one at that, in the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of power, not to mention the sociology of philosophies of power. Far from being the kind of applied, and hence inferior, science (only suitable for educationalists) that has ordi- narily been the view of it, the sociology of education lies at the foundation of a general anthropology of power and legitimacy. It leads us, in fact, to an understanding of the “mechanisms” responsible for the reproduction of social structures and for the reproduction of che mental structures that, because they are genetically and structurally linked to these objective struc~ tures, favor the misrecognition of their truth and thus the recognition of ther legitimacy. Given that, as established elsewhere,” the structure of social space as observed in advanced socicties is the product of two fundamental principles of differentiation — economic capital and cultural capital ~ the ‘educational institution, which plays a critical role in the reproduction of the istribution of culeural capital and thus in the reproduction of the structure ‘of social space, has becorne a central stake in the struggle for the monopoly ‘on dominant positions. Tt was necessary to bury che myth of the “school as liberating force,” guarantor of the triumph of “achievement” over “aseription,” of what is conquered over what is received, of works over birth, of merit and talent over heredity and nepotism, in order to perceive the educational institution in the true light of its social uses, that is, as one of the foundations of domi- ration and of the legitimation of domination. his break was all the more difficult to achieve, and to insist on, because those it most actively involves, that is, cultural producers, are the primary victims ~ as well as the primary beneficiaries ~ of the legitimating illusion. For evidence, one need only note the anxious eagerness with which all those who have an interest in this lack of consciousness greet those projects aimed at the restoration of Culture ‘whose sole virtue is that they comfort those privileged with cultural capital, whose narcissism has been wounded by the revelation of the common social foundations of their distinctive delights. But the suffering that scientific unveiling sometimes causes, in spite of its undoubtedly liberating nature, is also a result of the fact that one of the spe- cific properties of cultural capital is that it exists in an embodied state in the form of schemata of perception and action, principles of vision and division, and mental structures, As shown in the violence of the reactions triggered by the great symbolic revolutions, whether religious, political, or artsti, of which scientific analysis represents one particularly radical variant, the objectivation of implicit schemata of thought and action undoubtedly con- sticutes an attack ~ difficult to justify — against the very structures of con- sciousness, and a violence against the foundations of the enchanted6 Prologue experience of the world that Husserl called the “natural attitude" Nothing resembles a religious war more than “academic squabbles” or debates on ccultural matters. If it can seem easier to reform social security than spelling conventions or literary history curricula, this is because, in defending even the most arbitrary aspect of a cultural arbitrary, the holders of cultural capi- tal and undoubtedly more than any others the holders of petty portfolios, who are a bit like the “poor white trash” of culture ~ are defending not only their assets but also something like their mental integrity. I is against this fanaticism, rooted in a fetishistic blindness, that social science spontaneously works when, obeying here as elsewhere its call to denaturalize and defatalize, it unveils the historical foundations and social determinants of principles of hierarchization and evaluation that owe their symbolic efficacy, especially evident in the way academic verdicts take on the weight of destiny, to the fact that they assert themselves and are experi- enced as absolute, universal, and eternal. Parr I Tor the judgments and arguments of magic to be valid, they must have a principle chat chides examination. People argue abour the presence of manna here and there, but not about its existence. These principles, without which the judgments and arguments are not believed possible, are what philosophy calls cxtegories. Constantly present in language, without necessarily boeing explicit, they exist rether in the form of guiding prac~ tices of consciousness, which are themselves unconscious Marcel Mauss, “Introduction 3 analyse de quelques phénoménes religieux,” 1906 Academic Forms of ClassificationDualistic Thinking and the Conciliation of Opposites There is probably no object that could provide a clearer picture of the social structures and mental structures that govern academic verdicts than the sys- tem of statistical relations characteristic of a given population of academic Prizewinners. The prizewinners of the Concours Général,' for example, are the quintessential figure of an academic “elite” that, like a projective test, reveals the classificatory schemata that have produced it. The most appar. satly ineffable principles of the unformulated and unformulable definition of academic excellence are never more likely to give themselves away or betray themselves than in the more or less institutionalized procedures of selection, which are in reality so many operations of cooptation oriented by a practical sense of elective affinities. ‘The research on which the present analyses aro based was conducted via a mail survey of prizewinners of the 1966, 1967, and 1968 Concours Général. The response rate was exceprionally high (81 percent, 79 percent, and 71 percent, respectively), aiving 2 good indication of their ethical dispositions (especially if we note that the third mailing was done soon after May of 1968).'The population of respondents pre~ sencs no significant deviation with respect to the eriteia for which itis possible to control, For example, we count 33 percent women in the sample, compared to 32.5, percent in the roral pool of prizewinners, 23 percent science students in both cases, and 35.5 percent students from Parisian high schools among the prizewinners in the Sample, compared to 39 percent overall. Repeating the study over a period of 20 years (from 1966 to 1986) has enabled us to establish that the structure of the pop lation analyzed according to the principal variables has remained perfectly constant ‘overtime, except fora slight upward zrend in social origins within the distribution, a {rend 0 doubt linked to the increase in scholastic competition (ef. appendices t and 2 pp. 54-9), These data are all dated. Does this mean, as is usually implied, that they are obsolete or outdated? It is true that the state of the educational system as it was when the classification systems analyzed here were fully in use has faded into the past. The events of 1968, student criticism, the dissemination of sociological studies (here we have a perfect opportunity to remind the10. Academic Forms of Classification sociologist that she constantly encounters sociology in her object of study), the transformations in the teaching profession, and especially the upsetting of the hierarchy among academic disciplines (French and especially philo- sophy finding themselves dethroned, to the benefit of mathematics) ~ all of this has meant that professorial taxonomies can probably no longer function today with the triumphal innocence that makes 2 number of the documents ed in this work sccm like antediluvian fossils. This said, while philo- sophy, for example, has lost its statute of somewhat heroic marginality to fall into a marginality that is very difficule to perceive as elective, in certain areas of the intellectual field it is nevertheless still identified with the sover- eiga (if not exclusive) form of thought, and it still persists in imposing its great classificatory alternatives through the effect of the hysteresis of habi- tus, continuously reinforced by the nostalgia of cultural journalists. One could likewise show that the teaching of French has succeeded in salvaging its “vocation” as the worship of sacred texts, at the cost of an aggiornamen- 10 facilitated by the false theoretical breaks of semiology and of various forms of discourse analysis. Buc this is not the most important point. Without going so far as to creat the concrete, contextualized, dated object as a simple opportunity, or pre- text, the sociologist is not interested in this object in its contingent or, if you will, historical aspects (in the naive sense of the word). She does not aim to tell a story, but rather to analyze a state or an event in the social world ~ chis might be the training of future higher civil servants of the Rue Saint- Guillaume® today or the education of parliamentarians in Dijon in the cight- eenth century ~ in order to derive principles of understanding or explanation that will be applicable to other historical objects. This kind of theoretical induction aims to derive, from a historical case treated as “a par- ticular case of the possible” (Bachelard), a set of principles or hypotheses likely to become increasingly general with each subsequent application, “Thus the analyses presented here invite us to examine, for example, the sys- tem of classification and che indices that today’s mathematics teachers rely on 10 apprehend social properties in academic performances as well as, if not beuter than, their colleagues in French did 29 years ago, and, as it were, to naturalize these results Sociological analysis of academic forms of classification such as they may be observed in a given situation (and only then ~ this said in opposition to amateurs of the so-called philosophical disquisitions that are flourishing anew at the very heart of the social sciences) makes it possible to formulate the questions that any research project can and must ask about profoundly different agents and situations (this said in opposition to the hyperempiti cist illusion of utter submission to data). How do the categories of percep- tion and forms of expression used by mathematics teachers in 1988 to label differences that no one would deny exist (no more in this case than in the case of papers in French or philosophy) enable them to suppress or repress er” Conciliation of Opposites 11 the social dimension of both recorded and expected performances and to dismiss any questioning of the causes, both those causes that are beyond their control, and are thus independent of them, and those that are entirely dependent upon them, such as their perception of the norm and their propensity to assess performances in a dchistoricized and dehistoricizing Janguage that is nevertheless laden with social connotations and assump- tions, and therefore tailor-made for converting them into essences. In the present case, asin the rest of the work, we were obliged to forgo presenting our results in proportion to the effort their production had required and to resign ourselves to an often painful compromise between two coniliezing demands. On the one hand, we were faced with the demands of empirical proof, for which we would need to lay out all the procedures and products of our research in minute and exhaustive detail (pecifically, this would mean producing and analyzing several hundred sta Xstical tables and examining and interpreting countless texts ~ excerpts from incerviews and written works as well as historical documents). On the other hand, we were aware of the need for a coherent and understandable presen- tation of the subject-matter, which would lead us to reduce the apparatus of proof to what was strictly necessary and to ask the reader ~ who can always consult intermediate publications where all the necessary supporting mate rials are presented in greater detail ~to trust us. ‘THE DISCIPLINING OF MINDS Ranking by “order of excellence” is so closely associated with the notion of a concours [competitive examination] that it completely overshadows ranking by discipline. Academic subjects assumed to require talent and gifts and associated with the possession of considerable inherited cultural eapital (such as philosophy, French, and, in its place, mathematics) contrast with those that are seen to require primarily work and study (such as goog- raphy and the natural sciences, with history and modern or ancient lan- puages occupying an intermediate position) (ef. tables 1 and 2). The major differences between the two types have to do with indices of the modality of their relationship to what it means to be educated. On the one side lie disciplines that discourage willingness and academic zeal, as much through the nebulous and imprecise nature of the tasks they involve as through the vagueness and uncertainty of the signs of success or failure they offer, di ciplines that require often undefinable previous knowledge (“you have to have read a lot”). On che other lie disciplines that involve research that suits the taste for work “‘well done” and that appears “safe” and “profit- able” because one knows where to direct one’s efforts and results are casily measured.‘Table 1 Characteristics of Concours Général prizewinners by discipline (percent) Table? Characteristics of Concours Général prizewis Tan Tie 3 Tae Hi Pit Femth Grant Geng, Lang, Math, Pla Net i Other Gt Gong Mask Physio Nat Set Other (=a 21) Go3H reat) Ge) ee) Go) OH) Ga) G55 7 Gets m=) eke ate often as 47 @s m9 00mm TS iis 0A SBS S67 323 Tange Sf SS keg inicio Dil ty Bo 53g ay for) 4788 om aeons eet 57 my 3 Nee le ae nae pale all Tecsrenach7is 47 G3 3g 7? S Dats es 2g 230-9 ewe BR pw tha BE Ase B83 moe as eek fa Bete ms 3 aa? 38 no Tee rarely Beales [47 a3 50D) Ba x hema by Sig w= spi rh a> SS Novelide 286 1727 3 as Useee S33 za 19 oy fr B33 foo ae @o has Ayepion M3 tay see 73a Gu, 3330 too mo 350 Tags premiere Ttescer ie Stem 168i Limp eh a le lene a Sina we 33 3a as IG Smee ahh ete eee Dine 955033878 ae Wo mw mb Gs 2 is Grenson 93 = 67S 38 ee aS 1a 3 Oo Be ae Fegope” 33316747 88ST sae 80 wae 28047 oo 407k a En te tea “Are ta ie SS seas Gave 23-500 ey Eee Opinion oF work pa sae aot eas Pe ee for so Ne Cr ee er re Goines Ea oo as as BS 73 aR Fapieam toieileeinc tia” «gestae Rigs Govt sr Bo ar mr ts 2 ao 8 poe 3 Soy hte st Veyeod “tr tar 3 ao tse 23 MOO 5 Weck «BA sofa 8D? tele 473) 76770" monk 763588 ms rns oben hi yea replay 43 8067S tea too 30 Beoo- 33 2 saps None ss SS se Sa va 3 MG 738459 mo 150 one os os ts 32 Ske as 4 3323p 73 Seal oat? po oo 377 eke Pisdeaclince 2s 16) 334633279 33 sto Mo Ome BSS An jovia Von taben Bs 2 moe 03 as re 0D rs Kee 17 erase wt «as a 7 Dest nom kre gate Srey Bee Gh Sova fk OB “3 B No as os Skee rte a 9 Ye M30 003 as Says Gee eyo wold Hw anead a an k Wiy 53 367 O72 S129 MOD Ne a yun. dece RSet eee re alae HS os kaa ene m2 3 sy Doe a eee ee SS Oe Sa PSS 38 Eas = masa ies ee a ? % Se a2 > iS eye 2 s 2 off & om fe B39 9 Ma 0 2 3 S30 es eth 2S a ae: wa wo 3 aw reyount rail? aS > Si Bogie gn Bt bw gg entra Fone: pkewines toned wdlorhrows et a es N Ses sea” sas sae as 78 Yayo M3 Be az Be None Mier feo aa aos Be 0 came ee sete 89) a 0 a Sig M3? 3 tas ied of made you ae Meryem 47 inp eke Se 23 SR Sas e702 aa = ae Ps Wo tye? dL) Bs 8 Rigor 5 ey pigs? ele 7 Temcy = 438332 BA 788187 We M7 ae14 Academic Farms of Classification the prizewinners in Latin and Greek, & very large proportion of whom have received the prix d’excellence (63.3 percent, compared to 28.5 percent in philosophy fand 16.5 percent in French), are characterized by a set of systematic traits. They nore often consider themselves the best students in thei class than the other humanities prizewinners {60 percent, compared to 43 percent for philosophy stu- dents and 25 percent for the prizewinners in French) and they are the most likely among, the humanities prizewinners to consider themselves good in mathematics (435 pereent compared ro 19 percent); they nover rate themselves a5 very poor. ‘They are more inclined co judge their work as very good or excellent (26.5 percent compared to 18 percent), and tend to use the same adjectives to describe the kind of student they are and che kind of student they would like tobe, signs of a certitude Sui commensurate with thei academic consecration. Almost ll of them expect to go to the Feole Normale Supérieure (92.5 percent, excluding non-responses). They are snore inclined than the others to rank as highest the occupations of teacher or researcher (635 percent, compared to 41.3 percent of the French prizewinners, 35 percent of the geography prizewinners, 3 percent of the prizewinners in languages End 29 percent of the history prizewinners). Iti again arsong, these prizewinners that one finds the highest rate of sradents who are able o name former prizewinners {80 percent, as opposed t0 33.5 percent ofthe prizewinners in the natoral sciences) znd intend fo join the Association of Concours Général Prizewinners "The antagonism between the postions ~ suecines'y eaptured in the canonical mtithesis of the verdicts “brillant” and “earnest” [sériewe], or in the opposition between the literature agrégetion’ and the grammar ag most striking when we compare the prizewinners in Ereach (« large proportion of wrhom are women) from the dominant regions of social space to the prizewinners in an languages from the middle positions. The latter, often from stall families, have been ‘pushed” by their families (chey learned to read before going to school they heard about the Concoars Genéral very eacly on, et.) and an excremely high proportion of them (75 percent) have demoxatrated the virtues of doclty and consistency that the prix d'escellence seems to sanction, Strongly beholden to academic values (they justify joining the Association of Concours Général Prizewinners by invoking the heed t0 “delend the humanities” and take as thei zesponsiblity the professorial theme of “declining standards”), they are headed forthe most part for the prepara- tory classes’ and rank the occupations of teaching and research in first place. Ar she opposite end of the spectrunn, half of he French prizewinners from the dominant pole of social space (who are always very precocious) have skipped a grade in the Eourse of their studies. All require that «teicher be above all creative or brillians, tame talent as the principal factor in success, show more openly than the others theie disdain for geography, and maintain the most independent relationship wo aca demic eslture# “Talent subjects", which offer the most profitable investment to inherited cultural capital ~ that is, to so-called “independent” (as opposed to “acade- mic”) culture and to the familiar rapport with culture that can only be acquired through the diffuse teachings of familial education ~ recruit at a higher social level than those subjects that give students from the dominated regions of social space the occasion to exhibit just those ethical dispositions Conciliation of Opposites 15 whose compensatory function is liable to be more fully realized here than in other areas. It is among the prizewinners in French and mathematics that disdain for geogra- py is most often demonstrated (45 percent of the prizewinners in mathematies and 41.5 percent ofthe prizewinners in French stating that they have little or no taste for eogzaphy, as compared, for example, wo 25 percent ofthe prizewinners in languages dad ouly 135 percent ofthe prizewinners in the natural sciences) The prizewinners in French are also the most inclined to invoke “talent” to account for their success (hile those in history, geography, and the natural sciences are more Hkely to sruibute their success to methodical and regular work), Finally, the prizewinners in French and philosophy most often define the ideal teacher as “creative”, while those in history, geography, and the navaral sciences characterize the ideal wacher as “earnest? More significant stl isthe fac that the prizewinners in the most noble humanities, Bench and philosophy, distinguish thersslves from the others through the extens and diversity oftheir reeding and their knowledge in subjects not directly taught, such as painting and music (they meation zarly-named painters and musi- cians more often than the others). Unlike those who, owing their entire education to their schooling, have “classical”, “bookish”, or “scholastic” knowledge, preferences, and prac- tices (all of which are directly subordinate to the educational system, even when not directly produced by its exercises), the prizewinners in French and philosophy demonstrate in every way that they have a margin of free~ dom and security that is broad enough to enable them to maintain a rela~ tionship of educated dilettantism and eclectic familiarity with culrare (understood in a more “independent” and less “academic” sense), a relax tionship that may be spread or transferred to domains not yet recognized and consecrated by the school. They are thus the most likely to go to the movies (50 percent of the prizewinners in French and 24 percent of the prizewinners in philosophy do so at least once a week, compared to 17.5 percent of the prizewinners in geography and 10 percent of the Latin/Greek winners)," and above all, have the strongest propensity to adopt a “cul- tured” stance in these “independent” subjects (such as film and jazz). {A few opinions on jazz clesrly illustrate this contrast: (1) “very rich and appeal- ing type of artistic expression’ (French, son of chemical enginees); “There is some times in jazz. what you might call an alfecive language” (philosophy, son of journalist) “Jazz isan original antstc endeavor, stemming, from the original fusion ot black religious folklore and European folklore. The ‘black’ input gave it strong and iresisible chythm -..you fel" everything the musician puts imo his at. Also, a jazz tune isnot fixed oF static, but rather admits of variation and new and original interpretations, unlike the other musial genres, which are ‘imprisoned’ in their score” (mathematics, son of engineer) 2) “The chythm is modern and seems to express all the aspirations in the world, especially when i s played by blacks” (nat~ tril sciences, som of merchant); “There isa certain ‘black’ sadness about the jazz. of the New Orleans blues era” (neural seiences, daughter of mechani).16 Academic Forms of Classification We can see a further sign of this inclination ro adopt the posture of an apprentice intellectual in the fact that the winners in French and philosophy show a strong tendency to reverse or muddle the direct relationship berween social origins and political opinions, a relationship that remains clearly discernible in the other disciplines. They often profess opinions on the left or far left (58.5 percent and 52.5 percent, respectively), even more often than the geography prizewinners (24 percent), a large number of ‘whom place themselves in the center (35 percent), while the prizewinners in ancient languages, although somewhat less socially privileged, place them- selves somewhat more often on the right (10 percent and 25 percent). We ‘may note, first, that this propensity becomes increasingly obvious (at least in the humanities) the higher the individual's scholastic achievement (125 percent of those who received the prix place themselves on the far left, compared to only 7.5 percent of those who received accessts); second, that the total number of moderates (left, center, right) and abstentions, which reaches 70 percent in geography, 69 percent in the natural sciences, and 56.3 percent in the classics, falls to 33 percent in French; and finally, that the prizewinners from superior social positions describe themselves as being on the left more often in French and philosophy than in the other disciplines; as a result we may assume that this political choice reveals their adherence to the representations and values that are the most widespread among intel- Jectuals, or, more precisely, the sense that they have the right and in fact the reed to conform to a certain image of the intellectual by adopting positions oon subjects that, according to the current social definition, are considered a must for any true intellectual. ‘The prizewinners in philosophy demonstrate that they are more inlined thaa all the others (including the winners in French) to adopt the posture ofan intellectual, in their practices as much asin their statements. Nesly all ead one or several “intel- lecsul” journals (Les Temps Modernes, Critique, Tel Quel, Cabiers Pour l’Analyse they have no trouble identifying the school of thought that best expresses sheir views (in contrast the prizewinners in Latin/Greck, most of who de not answer, for the prizewinners in French, who show some hesitation in defining themselves) and they somerimes add reservations and nuances to their answer, a i to highlight sore clearly the originality of thei: thought: “The imporeant thing is not what best conveys my thoughts, bur rather what is necessary. Marxism, informed by Hegel’ fine exegeses, has a lotto teach us" (son of commercial manager). Almost all have {grand intellectual plans, expecting to devote their eareers to literature (“It isn't the story of a voyage, it's the voyage ise” ~ son of higher civil servant) as writers poets, or novelists {I fel desply that | must write'~ son of commercial manager), Gr 10 philosophy ("I’s the absolute discipline” ~ son of commercial manager “Philosophy encompasses all the other subject” ~ son of composer). Ina sialar ‘ein, hen insted 0 indicate what the ideal farure would befor them, the prizewine ners in philosophy frequently answer in general “visionary” terms: “Revolution, the end of exploitation” (son of head of postal distribution center); “a classless society” {son of commercial manages; a future withoue war, an open society” (sn of exee= Conciliation of Opposites 17 tive), They thus contast very markedly with the prizewinners in the natural sei- ences, who express more direet concerns, often connected to their own farures and, more specifically, zo their furare occupations: “For me, to be a doctor” (son of mer chant) “Tesvould be ro be able to practice the wade of my choice and to raise a fami- ly (Gon of tradesman). When they do not limit themselves to their own personal airs, che prizewinners inthe lest noble disciplines act as defenders of mertocratie ideology: “The end of inequality founded on money, bith, and race, vo be replaced bya hierarchy founded on the establishment of a peaceful society in which sll needs ‘would be met and where time would be devoted above all 0 art and culture” (geog raphiy, son of postal supervisor). ‘Thus all the traits by which the French educational system recognizes the elite of its elite, and which define the way to excel par excellence, are con- centrated in these successful ideal types ~ the prizewinners in French and, to a lesser degree, philosophy.” This should come as no surprise; there is per- fect agreement here between the values expressly professed by the entire tradition of the humanities and the values revealed in the practices and state~ ments of the people who have succeeded in them. More telling than a long analysis of the relationship of the literate to literary culture, a quick exami- nation of the two prizewinning essays from 1969 (which, through a kind of objective chance, discuss “creation” and “‘reading”) reveals the profound affinity between the tradition of training in the humanities thoroughly per~ meated with a humanistic, personalist, and spiritualist ideology, and the pedagogical tradition that associates the academic devaluation of everything that has anything to do with school with the cult of so-called “personal” expression. It is in fact a charismatic representation of the act of writing, described as “creation” and “mystery”, and of the deciphering of a written text, seen as a “creative” reading involving the spiritual identification of the “T" of the reader with the “I” of the author, that is at the basis of the sub- jectivist praise of the arbitrary of sensations and feelings, a pretext for the complacent egoism of self-centered effusions, romantic mysticism, and exis- tential pathos." Analyzing the systematic differences that oppose students in “talent” dis- ciplines to students in “work” subjects thus reveals very clearly the system of oppositions between antagonistic and complementary properties or qual- ities that structures judgments. One can thus draw up a table of the cate- sgories that, deeply inscribed as they are in the minds of teachers and (good) students, are applied to all academic and academically thinkable reality (this realty itself, moreover, being organized according to the same principles) — in other words, to persons, teachers or students, 2s well as to their output (courses, research, ideas, discourses): brilliant/dull; effortless/laborious; dis- tinguished/vulgar; cultured/scholastic; inspived/banal; original/common; lively/flat; fine/crude; noteworthy insignificant; quick/slow; nimble/heavys clegant/awkward, ete18 Academic Forms of Classification ‘Among the many possible sources of illustration, we shall use examining com- mits reports from the agrégation and the entrance examination to the Feole [Normale for thei vahue as quas-legel official declarations. “In short, whether it bea matter of the soundness of the information (...}, the accuracy of the terms, o¢ the feeling of true elegance, the explicaions de texte asa whole (..) left us with a dis quieting impression of ignorance, confusion, and vulgarity (literate agrégation, men, 1959).""The committe is prepared ta forgive many atekecard phrases and even the isolated misinterpretation, but it will always be merciless when faced with stupid pretention, pedantry, and vulgarity” (entrance examination, Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm, French explicarions de texte, 1966). “We could thus move beyond the bumble and morose effort of a laborious reading, taining the fluidity of translation marked by both elegance and exactitude” (bid). “One would hope ‘thas this simplicity [of subject-matter] would allow a few to demonsceae their faii- ty brilliantly” (graeamar agrégation, men, 1962). Of all the opposing categories wich which academic adgment ie armed, the strongest is probably the one between eruci- tion (always suspected of bearing the mark of a laborious effort of acquisition) and talent (with the concomitant notion of wide-ranging knowledge and sophistication [culture générale), an opposition that underlies the discredit of those disciplines assumed to require only memory the most disdained ofall skis. “What we noticed was the lack of culsure générale (..) more useful to the candidates than the erudite works they get lost in (literature agrégetion, men, 1959). “Nor everyone is given talent” ibid.) “About ten papers revealed genuine talent” (ibid. “The subject that allowed for talent” (iterature agrégation, men, 1962). “This text sllows us to rank the talented with greater assurance” (bid). “We might almost say: better that they kcsow even les, but chat they know it better” (bid). “Its, moreover, on the gual- ties of saste and judgment and not just flatly on memory that we should like to dis- tinguish among the candidates” (literature agréyation, men, 1959). “Without, of course, being able to disregard the effort of memorization, indeed necessary in philology, the fact remains that isis the global snderstanding acquired through reflection that gives linguistic fats heir meaning and, finally, their pedagogical and hhuman importance” (grammar agrégation, women, 1989) ‘The language used by the humanities prizewinners to explain why their work was singled our is a perfect illustration of the correspondence that obtains between objective positions in the hierarchy of disciplines and self= image, an image inseparable fram the representation of the qualities socially associated with the different disciplines. (On the one hands “Might i be the style?" (Prench, soa of professor of medicine); “Originality, rigor, sensitivity” (French, son of chemical engineer); “I think my ‘work was singled out thanks to a cercain original quality [personnatité)” (Preach, son of journalist; “original [perenvel, not too academic, clear” (philosophy, son of blue-collar worker). On the other hand: “Maybe because of the maps. which were quite thorough, and greater knowledge about the Massif Central and the Vosges than about the other mountainous regions” (geography, som of clerical worker). clarity of outline” (geography, son of postal inspector). “Clarity, chars, relee- ences” (natural sciences, son of drawing teacher). “Restrain, clarity” (natural sei Conciliation of Opposites 19 ences, son of blue-collar worker). “Quality and number of charts, rigor of outline” (natural sciences, son of commercial manager) The ancient languages seem 0 ocei- py an intermediate position. ‘The prizewinners in mathematies and physics most often mention clarity, rigor, accuracy, and precision, but comments about style are not completely absent: “writing, rigor, and construction of argument’ (methemat ics, son of naval training teacher). “I think my work was set apart by its c the sather quick solutions co the questions I treated” (mathematics, son of ‘bypokhagne teacher). “The brief and clegant nature of my solutions” (mathemat- ies, son of physician). ty and Given that the same taxonomies that serve both to classify academic dis- ciplines and to determine the personal qualities they require also organize the perception and appreciation that “disciplined” students (who will have to choose among them) have of their own qualities, itis not surprising that academic verdicts should have the power to determine one’s “vocation” and that statistical analysis should uncover just as rigorous a connection between the properties socially conferred on the different disciplines and the dispositions of those who excel in them (or teach them). Disciplines choose their students as much as students choose their disciplines, imposing upon them categories of perception of subjects and careers as well as of their own skills (hence the sense they may have of the affinity between the different classes of disciplines “or ways of practicing them — theoretical or empirical, for example ~ and their own academically con- structed and consecrated abilities). ‘The belief that one has been predestined, a conviction produced or reinforced by academic verdicts (often expressed in the language of “gifts”) and largely determinative of “vocations” is one of the means by which the predictions of the institution are realized. THE PRIVILEGE OF EASE Differences among disciplines both cover up and recover social differences. the canonical disciplines, such as French of classics and mathematics or physics, socially designated as the most important and most noble, conse- erate students who come most often from well-po abundant cultural capital, correspondingly more of whom have followed the royal path of lycées and classical tracks from the sixiéme to the termi- nale and skipped grades in the course of their secondary schooling, and who are better informed about possible vocations and careers. This should come as no surprise if the academic hierarchy of disciplines coincides with the hierarchy established according to the average age of the prizewinners, a hicrarchy extending in the sciences from mathematics to physics and the natural sciences and in the humanities from French or classics to history and geography or modern languages. oned families with20 Academic Forms of Classification ‘One of the clearest attestations of the privilege that is granted to charis- matic values, leading the educational institution to disregard strictly scholastic learning, is the cult of precocity, valued as an indicator of “gifs.” “the idea of precocity is social construct simply defined by the relationship bberween the age at which a practice is achieved and the age considered “normal” for its achievement or, more precisely, the modal age at which itis achieved in che popu- lktion of reference ~in other words, for academic precocry, the modal age of the individuals who have reached a determined level of studies. We immediatly see thst, just a8 the idea of sexual precocty assumes reference 10 more or less firmly estab~ Tshed divisions of age categories, the idea of academic precocty assumes the exis tence ofa cursus distributed ariong school classes, indicating so many age-dependent seapes (grades) in the progressive acquisition of knowledge. As Philippe Ariés ba Shown, such 2 structure developed only et the bepinning of che sixteenth century. “The undifferentiated pedagogy of the Middle Ages did not assume a structural rels- tionship beeween abilities and age." As the structure of the crsas became increas- ingly defined and set and partcslaly from the seventeenth century on, precocions Careers became more fare, and it was only then that they began to ppear as an index of superiority and a promise of social success. "Through the near miraculous speed of her learning, the precocious stu- dent (che extreme example of which is “the child prodigy” or, as we would say today, “the exceptionally gifted child”) demonstrates the extent of the natural gifts that enable her to avoid the slow work ordinary individuals must perform in order to learn. In fact, precocity is but one of the many ace- demic retranslations of cultural privilege. We thus note that the percentage of prizewinners whose father and mother have a diploma beyond the bac- calauréat goes from 38 percent and 3 percent (respectively) among those who are 18 or older in the premiére, or 19 or older in the terminale, to 39 percent and 21 percent for 17-18 year olds, 52 percent and 31 percent for 16-17 year olds, and 69.5 percent and 37 percent for 15-16 year olds (social origins following a similar pattern). This should come as no surprise if what wwe call precocity, and what is in reality a manifestation of eulsural heritage, is closely related to all indicators of success. "The idee of “gifts” is so closely associated with that of precocity that being, young tends to constirate a guarantee of talent in and of itself. So, for example, agré= ation examining commistees will identify « concours as “brilliant” according to the proportion of “young talent” among the newcomers. “We lave seen several of these {young recruits distinguish themselves this year. Of 27 candidates accepted, we count 14 who have never taught, and 8 of these are renked among the top ten (...). Their ‘suceess does not lead us to forget the merits of the practicing teachers who, placed in less favorable working conditions, put forth a valiant effort and triumphed over dif ficulty (...). But to those who succeeded so well i cher first concours, we are grate fal not only for their having enlivened the oral with their spirit and their desice to persuade, but also for their having provided us with precious testimony” (grammar Jerézation, men, 1963). “In the oral, the youngest candidates turn out to be the best, Conciliation of Opposites 21 lrveler in the imerview, more alere, sharper. Throughout the examination, grace has been subsied for’ ieegane” nance ceminaon te feck Normale Supérieure d'Ulm, philosophy oral, 1968). The precocious smadens, darting of the raining commie reeves special weament, her lcuna a mistakes (ater preted a5 “youthful transgressions”) sometimes even taken 28 pasial proof of her talent. “They are younger thin in past years. Might we not thik tht many have cred through lack of maturity and experience, and that their faults will be quickly corrected (,..)? Beneath their azokerdness, beneath their naivety, we a times find talents and personal qualities that ate in fact so many promises of things to come” (literature agrégation, women, 1963) In fact, precocity is but one of the indices of the mode of cultural acquisi- tion favored by the educational institution ~ but a particularly reliable one. If the systems of manners set apart by academic taxonomies (whatever their degree of refinement) always refer back to social differences, this is because the way education is sequted lives on in what is acquired in the form of 2 certain way of using the acquisition. The modality of the relationship an individeal maintains with the school, wth the education it wansmiv and with the language it uses and requires depends on the distance between her family miliew and the academic world and on her generie chances for suz- vival in the system ~ or, in other words, on the probability of her acceding to a determined academic position that is objectively attached to her group of origin, Thos, when, in the indefinable nuances that define “ease” or ‘natural” talent, we think we recognize behavior or ways of speaking con- sidered authentically “cultured” because they bear no mark of the effort and no trace of the work that go into their acquisition, we are really refer- ring to 4 particular mode of acquisition: what we call ease is the privilege of those who, having imperceptibly acquired their culture through a gradual familiarization in the bosom of the family, have academic culture as their native culture and can maintain a familiar rapport with it that implies the unconsciousness of its acquisition. Support provided by the family takes on different forms indifferent milieu: the mount of explicit uppor: advice, explanations ete) peresived as such neesss 2 soca level inerenses(esng fom 0 percent inthe lower les 25 pr cen inthe middle categories and 36 percent in the upper categories), although appears 40 deresse with a student's increased sucess (98 per cont of the aceait winners say they have had help compared to 27 per cent of the prix winners). Tt i nevertheless « fact hat support is only the cb par of the “pits” of al kinds that chile sv ro teats wee for xml ht he serena opine Sie aly increase wish scala ~ am has caaione ony one tesom, i eS the indirect and diffuse encouragement given by the family - we see that upper-class children receive both diffe and explic suppor while mile. rescive mertly dines suppors lower-lss children, with few exceptions, being22 Academic Forms of Classification tunable to count on receiving cither of these two forms of aid, with their direce academic rerurns. By making outward behavior [la maniére}, that is, a person’s relationship to culture and to language (obviously associated with very real differences in both content and form), che central point of application of professorial judgment, the traditional taxonomy unconsciously implemented by teachers in the form of an inherited corpus of stereotypical epithets and ritual phra- ses (predestined to structure the inseparably technical and aesthetic or ethi cal bases of academic “valuation”) functions as a relay/screen that both establishes and obscures the relationship between scudents” social origins and their grades. Vested with the self-evidence institutions acquire when they are perceived by minds structured according to the very structures that have organized them, the academic taxonomy, through the traditional vocabulary that conveys it, exercises its powers of social discrimination beyond the reach of pedagogical or political vigilance." This is how teach- ors, under the illusion of neutrality, can profess academic judgments that, as their choice of metaphors and adjectives demonstrate, barely mask social prejudices. For example, with the constellation of epithets used to express the idea of “carnestness” [le sériewx] the academic taxonomy designates the generating and unifying principle of the practices characteristic of students from the middle positions, students who must find in their own willingness to work the resources necessary to compensate for the handicaps related to their lack of cultural capital. in claiming qualities of tenacity more often than the others,” the prizewinners from the petty bourgeoisie reveal, with a lucidity that is merely a sign of their subordination to academic verdicts, the objective truth of their academic practice, which is necessarily marked, in its laborious and strained modality, by the continuous and sustained effort they have had to put forth in order to remain in the system (or, as we say, to “hang in there”) Ip addition to all the previously mentioned characteristics, we should point out that the prizewinners from the middle positions are the most likely (relatively) 10 belong to a cultural group (atthe rate of 29.5 pereent, compared to 14 percent for the upper categories) ~ a tendency that is particularly strong for children of clerical workers and primary school teachers ~ and to associations in general, for that mat- ter. We can see another (albeit no doubt much more ambiguous) sign of their ten- dency to concentrate all their efforts on academic activities in the fact thet they participate in sports less often than the others (with 39 percent nonparticipants), 2 sate similar to that of the children of blue-collar workers (at 46 percent), and in con- trast to that of children from privileged families (243 percent). Most imporcanty, the middle-class prizewinners have had a normal school career more often than the thers (no skipped or repeated grades}, and have received the prix d’ecellence some- ‘what more often thatthe others, distinction which, in contrast 0 signs of approval such as honors [mention] on the baccalaurézt, rewards their hard work and probably ll | Conciliation of Opposites 23 also their docility with regard to teachers, cheir teaching, and the disciplines the impose. Upwards of 40 percent of them have resved the pix deselions whtes, the year, Compared to 38 percent of the students from upper postions. The pattern is similar among the children of primary teachers (60 percent) and secondary teach, e/professors (35 percent) (this difference being insufciently explained by the fact iti cikren of the lates most often graduate from Paris Iyeées in which the selection criteria and competition are the stifest) In the proparatory claspes for the scence an a ee grands dcoes, the students from the mide regions are also te most likely (along with the lower-class students) to have obtained the prix dex, caller and she least aly to have ceived honorsomthe henna Everything seems to indicate that the longer the period of time over which the control of knowledge, abilities, and ethical dispositions (always taken into account in academic judgment) extends, the more likely its that the students fom the dominated regions will be ina position to grin appre, ciation for their perseverance, tenacity, and docility. Students from che 'pper positions, on the other hand, more casly impose their positive quali. Hes on the occasion of final exams, especially orals (which, under their curs rent definition, require more charismatic prowess and a clearer exhibition of brilliance than written exams), The contrast between discontinuons and con- nuous efforts and especially between quick and slow work, which recall the antithesis between the precocious student and the late bloomer, thus arbi. trarily become part of the evaluation of knowledge and abilities (they will become the primary criteria of selection in the preparatory classes, where of comprehension and execution are one of the conditions for sur. ACADEMICA MEDIOCRITAS Teachers’ pedagogical practices, particularly those involving selection, betray the tension within the educational insetution Becavaed Zetlemle tnd worldly values and petty bourgeois and bourgeois dispositions, While fly fecognizing only chat relationship to culture that is acquired wholly outside the school, the educational institution cannot completely devalue an acade. ai relationship to culture without denying its own method of inculcasion, While reserving its favors for those students who owe it the least with ‘expect to what matters most, the educational institution cannot completely deny those who owe it everything and who breathe forth a willingness an adocility that it cannot disdainfally ignore. And, in fact, the school tends to treat a poor relationship to culture with indul- fence when ths relationship appears to be che price paid for a good relationship to the school. Agrégation examining committees, who condom “casual attitudes” ond “cavalier self-confidence” with the utmost vigor (as a sien of diurrense Ine hunt