NLR 101, September–October 2016

ERIC HOBSBAWM

P I E R RE BOURD I E U

L
et me start with a little story about intellectual ex-
change, which Bourdieu would have liked.1 As we
know, Wittgenstein entirely changed the orientation
of his philosophy after 1929, principally as a result
of the criticisms of the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, with
whom he liked to walk and talk at Trinity College, Cambridge.
One day, when Wittgenstein was putting forth the argument
that a proposition and what it describes must have the same
‘logical multiplicity’, Sraffa replied with a Neapolitan gesture
of scepticism or contempt, brushing his fingertips up and out-
ward from his chin: ‘What is the logical form of this?’ Clearly,
these conversations were of the highest importance for
Wittgenstein, who said he owed to Sraffa an ‘anthropological
method’ of tackling philosophical problems; in other words,
the realization that social rules and conventions contribute to
the sense of our words and gestures.

As for Sraffa, he was far from according the same importance

to his exchanges with Wittgenstein, as he told his friend and
student Amartya Sen (also a friend of Bourdieu).2 In his view,
the argument he had used that day was ‘rather obvious’.
Perhaps, but it was only obvious for someone already ac-
quainted with the ‘anthropological’ approach to philosophy
practiced in the intellectual circles of the Italian left in which
Sraffa was active, and where he had got to know Antonio
Gramsci, a close friend from the days of Ordine Nuovo until his
death. If I start with this story, it is not just because Gramsci’s
preoccupations overlapped to such a large extent with those of
Bourdieu, albeit in a rather different way and in an Italian in-
tellectual context, not a French one; it’s also because it illus-
trates the cultural subjectivity inherent in all intellectual ex-
change. When we read an author, we set off in search of our
own points of interest, not theirs. Thus when non-French histo-
rians read Bourdieu’s work—which flows to such an enormous
extent from his intellectual context, that of post-war France—
it’s not his thought and its development they’re considering,
but their own. Not that it’s a dialogue of the deaf—I think I un-
derstand what Bourdieu is saying—but rather a case of parallel
soliloquies, which sometimes seem to coincide. I would ask
you to bear this in mind if my reading of Bourdieu seems par-
tial or unfounded.

In the light of this initial warning, I will pose a simple ques-

tion: what has Bourdieu contributed, and what can he contrib-
ute, to the work of contemporary historians? What’s most
striking, to begin with, is the central place his work accords to
both history and interdisciplinarity. In the hundredth issue of
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, a special number that
Bourdieu saw as ‘the reaffirmation of a project’, five of the nine
articles are by historians or devoted to historical subjects; and
six, we may note in passing, are by foreign authors. Indeed, a
quick glance at the journal confirms that in Bourdieu’s last
decade, the Actes turned increasingly towards historical en-
quiry. Bourdieu had been accustomed to working with histori-
ans ever since Braudel had welcomed him to his Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme; in a us-German survey, he is cited
alongside Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Laslett
and Maurice Godelier in a list of contemporary French and
English historians, Marxist or otherwise, with an interest in an-
thropology.3 He took part in Clemens Heller’s fascinating inter-
national gatherings, the Round Tables on Social History, and
published a commentary on our debate on the history of
strikes.4 I vividly recall our conversations in the late seventies
on the need for a history of sport—a topic as dear to the edito-
rial committee of the Actes de la recherche as to Bourdieu him-
self. In short, Bourdieu was perfectly at ease with historians, or
at least with some of them.

And yet, he chose to become not a historian but a philosopher-

turned-sociologist. In his most important writings, he refers
much less to historians than to philosophers, ethnographers
and social anthropologists, and cites even fewer—Georges
Duby, almost alone among his French contemporaries. There
are eminent historians whose names are never mentioned, and
Michelet is specifically rejected. Readers of Homo Academicus
(1984) know how he distrusted the sort of history practiced at
the higher levels of the French system. Despite his gratitude to
Braudel, whose support was unqualified, he had no sympathy
for the longue durée approach of the Annales historians.5 He of-
ten noted their lack of interest in a historical analysis of the
concepts used in the analysis of the past, in a ‘reflexive use of
history’.6 The reproach is not entirely just, especially to the
Germans—one thinks of the encyclopaedic Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe—but it is true that historians, apart from histori-
ans of ideas, show little interest in philosophy. Nor do philoso-
phers practice much history. In this respect, Hume in the eigh-
teenth century, and Croce and his school in the twentieth, are
the exceptions that prove the rule, though their historical
works are not much read today.

Nevertheless, the past has a central stake in Bourdieu’s work

since it constitutes the soil in which the present’s roots are
plunged, forming the basis for our capacity to understand our
own times and to act upon them. For my own part, like many
historians, I have always admired Bourdieu and have often
been inspired by him. Had he wanted, he could have been a
great historian himself, which is manifestly not the case with
Foucault, Althusser or Derrida, to mention only the French
thinkers best known abroad. Bourdieu had the historian’s pas-
sion for the concrete, the specific, the singular; he had curiosity
and a gift for observing things from a distance—a capability
that good anthropologists share with good historians. Braudel
liked to say: ‘Historians are never on holiday. Each time I take
a train, I learn something.’ Bourdieu would have agreed. Only
someone with a natural gift for social history could have dis-
cerned this characteristic of rural society:

The relative frequency of proverbs, prohibitions, sayings and

regulated rites declines as one moves from practices tied to
agricultural activity, or directly associated with it, . . . towards
the divisions of the day, or moments of human life, not to
speak of domains apparently abandoned to chance, such as the
internal organization of the household, parts of the body,
colours or animals.7

As an observer he was both sensitive to and fascinated by all

that went on below the surface of daily life in his country, the
unspoken and unrecorded assumptions of contemporary
French existence, the symptoms of the nation’s state of health.

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