For a Scholarship with Commitment

Author(s): Pierre Bourdieu

Source: Profession , 2000, (2000), pp. 40-45
Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595701

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 For a Scholarship
with Commitment

PIERRE BOURDIEU

The question that I would like to raise is this: Can intellectuals, and espe
cially scholars, intervene in the political sphere? Must intellectuals partake in
political debates as such, and if so, under what conditions can they interject
themselves efficiently? What role can researchers play in the various social
movements, at the national level and especially at the international level?
that is, at the level where the fate of individuals and societies is increasingly
being decided today? Can intellectuals contribute to inventing a new man
ner of doing politics fit for the novel dilemmas and threats of our age?
First of all, to avoid misunderstandings, one must state clearly that re
searchers, artists, or writers who intervene in the political world do not
thereby become politicians; according to a model created by Emile Zola on
the occasion of the Dreyfus Affair, they become intellectuels or "public in
tellectuals," that is, people who invest in a political struggle their specific
authority and the values associated with the exercise of their craft, such as
the values of disinterestedness and truth?in other words, people who
enter the terrain of politics but without forsaking their duties and compe
tencies as researchers. (This is to say, in passing, that the canonical opposi
tion that is made, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, between
scholarship and commitment could be devoid of foundation: the intrusions
of artists, writers, and scientists?Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, or Andrei
Sakharov?in the public sphere find their basis and rationale in a scientific

The author is Professor of Sociology at the College de France. A version of this paper was pre
sented at the 1999 MLA convention in Chicago.

Profession 2000 40

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 PIERRE BOURDIEU III 41

community defined by its commitment to objectivity, to probity, and by a

presumed independence from worldly interests. It is as much to this pre
sumed respect of the unwritten moral code of their trade as to their techni
cal competency that scholars owe their social authority.)
By investing their artistic or scientific competency in civic debates,
scholars incur the risk of disappointing or, better yet, of shocking others.
On the one hand, they will shock those, in their own universe, the acad
emy, who choose the virtuous way out by remaining enclosed in the ivory
tower and who see in commitment a violation of the famous axiological
neutrality?wrongly equated with scientific objectivity when it is in fact a
scientifically unimpeachable form of escapism. And, on the other hand,
they will shock those, in the political and journalistic fields, who see schol
ars as a threat to their monopoly over public speech and, more generally,
all those who are disturbed by the intervention of scholars in political life.
Scholars will risk, in a word, awakening all forms of anti-intellectualism
that were hitherto dormant among the powers that be, bankers, industrial
ists, and high civil servants; among journalists; among politicians (espe
cially left-wing politicians), all of whom are now holders of cultural capital;
and, even, among intellectuals themselves.
But to indict anti-intellectualism, which is almost always underpinned by
ressentiment, does not exempt intellectuals from the criticism of intellectual
ism: this critique to which all intellectuals can and must submit themselves.
Critical reflexivity, in other words, is the absolute prerequisite of any politi
cal action by intellectuals. Intellectuals must engage in a permanent critique
of all the abuses of power or authority that are committed in the name of
intellectual authority; or, if you prefer, they must submit themselves to the
relentless critique of the use of intellectual authority as a political weapon
within the intellectual field and elsewhere. All scholars must also submit
themselves to the critique of the scholastic bias (as analyzed in my book
Pascalian Meditations), a bias whose most pervasive form, which concerns us
directly here, is the propensity to a kind of paper revolutionism devoid of
genuine target or effect. I believe that the generous but unrealistic impulse
that led many European intellectuals of my generation to submit to the dic
tates of the Communist Party still inspires too often nowadays what I call
campus radicalism, this typically academic propensity to confuse the things
of logic for the logic of things, according to the pitiless formula of Marx, or,
closer to our current predicament, to mistake revolutions in the order of
words, or texts, for revolutions in the order of things, to mistake verbal
sparring at academic conferences for interventions in the affairs of the city.
Having posed these preliminary, apparendy negative, reflections, I can
assert that intellectuals (by which I mean those artists, writers, and scientists

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42 II FOR A SCHOLARSHIP WITH COMMITMENT

who engage in political action on the strength of their artistic or scientific

competency) are indispensable to social struggles, especially nowadays
given the quite novel forms that domination assumes. A number of recent
historical works have displayed the pivotal role played by think tanks in the
production and imposition of the neoliberal ideology that rules the world
today. To the productions of these reactionary think tanks, which support
and broadcast the views of experts appointed by the powerful, we must op
pose the productions of critical networks that bring together "specific
intellectuals" (in Foucault's sense of the term) into a veritable collective intel
lectual capable of defining by itself the topics and ends of its reflection and
action?in short, an autonomous collective intellectual.
This collective intellectual can and must, in the first place, fulfill neg
ative functions: it must work to produce and disseminate instruments of
defense against symbolic domination, which increasingly relies on the au
thority of science (real or imitated). Buttressed by the specific competency
and authority of the collective thus formed, the collective intellectual can
submit dominant discourse to a merciless logical critique aimed not only at
the lexicon of the discourse {globalization, flexibility, employ ability, etc.) but
also at its mode of reasoning and in particular at its use of metaphors (e.g.,
the anthropomorphization of the market). The collective intellectual can
in addition subject this discourse to a sociological critique, which extends
discursive critique, by uncovering the sociological determinants that bear
on the producers of dominant discourse (starting with journalists, espe
cially economic journalists) and on their products. Lastly, it can counter
the pseudoscientific authority of authorized experts (and chief among
them of economic experts and advisers) with a genuinely scientific critique
of the hidden assumptions and often faulty reasoning that underpin their
pronouncements.
But the collective intellectual can also fulfill a positive function by contri
buting to the collective work of political invention. The collapse of Soviet
style regimes and the weakening of communist parties in most European
and Latin American nations has liberated critical thought. But meanwhile
the neoliberal doxa has filled the vacuum, and social critique has withdrawn
into the "small world" of academe, where it marvels at itself and engages
in internecine campus wars that threaten no one on any front. The whole
edifice of critical thought is thus in need of reconstruction. This work of
reconstruction cannot be done, as some have thought in the past, by a sin
gle great intellectual, a master thinker endowed only with the resources of
his singular thought, or by the authorized spokesperson for a group or an
institution presumed to speak in the name of those without voice, union,
party, and so on. This is where the collective intellectual can play its irre

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 PIERRE BOURDIEU ||| 43

placeable role, by helping to create the social conditions for the collective
production of realist Utopias. It can organize or orchestrate joint research on
new forms of political action, on new ways of mobilizing and making mo
bilized people work together, on new ways of elaborating projects and
bringing them to fruition. It can play the role of a midwife by assisting the
dynamics of working groups in their efforts to express, and thereby dis
cover, what they are and what they could or should be, and by helping
thereby to realize the reappropriation and accumulation of the immense
social stock of knowledge with which the social world is pregnant. It could
thus help the victims of neoliberal policies discover the differential effects
of one and the same cause (commodification) in apparently radically di
verse events and experiences?especially diverse for those who undergo
them?associated with the different social universes, in education, medi
cine, social welfare, criminal justice, and so on, within one nation or across
nations. (This is what we tried to do in the book The Weight of the World,
which brought to light new forms of social suffering caused by state re
trenchment, with the purpose of compelling politicians to address them.)
This task is at once extremely urgent and extremely difficult, because
the representations of the social world that we need to fight, that must be
resisted and countered, are issued out of a veritable conservative revolution?
as was said of the pre-Nazi movement in Weimar Germany. In order to
break with the tradition of the welfare state, the think tanks from which
have emerged the political programs of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher and, after them, of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder,
or Lionel Jospin, had to effect a veritable symbolic counterrevolution and
to produce a paradoxical doxa. This doxa is conservative but presents itself as
progressive; it seeks the restoration of the past order in some of its most ar
chaic aspects (especially as regards economic relations), yet it passes off re
gressions, reversals, surrenders as forward-looking reforms or revolutions
leading to a whole new age of abundance and liberty (as with the language
of the so-called new economy and the celebratory discourse around net
work firms and the Internet).
All this can be clearly seen in the efforts to dismantle the welfare state,
that is, to destroy the most precious democratic conquests in the areas of
labor legislation, health, social protection, and education. To fight such a
progressive-retrogressive policy is to risk appearing conservative even as
one defends the most progressive achievements of the past. This situation
is all the more paradoxical in that one is led to defend programs or institu
tions that one truly wishes to be changed, such as public service and the
national state, which no one could rightly want to preserve as is, or unions
or even public schooling, which must be continually subjected to the most

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44 II FOR A SCHOLARSHIP WITH COMMITMENT

merciless critique. (Thus it is that I am sometimes suspected today of being

a turncoat or accused of contradicting myself when I defend a public edu
cation system that, as I have shown time and again, fulfills a function of
conservation and consecration of the social order.)
It seems to me that scholars have a decisive role to play in the struggle
against the new neoliberal doxa and the formal (and false) cosmopolitanism
of those obsessed with globalization or global competitiveness. This fake
universalism serves the interests of the dominant: in the absence of a world
state and a world bank financed by taxation over the international circula
tion of speculative capital, it serves to condemn as a politically incorrect re
gression toward nationalism the recourse to the only force, the national
state, that is capable of protecting emergent countries such as South Korea
or Malaysia from the stranglehold of multinational corporations. This fake
universalism allows one to stigmatize, under demonizing labels like Is
lamism or fundamentalism, the efforts of such and such a Third World
country to assert or restore its political autonomy, based on state power. To
this verbal universalism, which also wreaks havoc on the relations between
the sexes and which leaves citizens isolated and disarmed in the face of the
overwhelming power of transnational corporations, committed scholars
can oppose a new internationalism, capable of tackling with truly interna
tional force such environmental issues as air pollution, the ozone layer,
nonrenewable fuels, or atomic clouds?because these problems know no
boundaries between nations and social classes?or such economic issues as
the foreign debt of emergent countries or the question of the hegemony of
financial capital in the field of cultural production and diffusion (as with
the growing concentration of publishing or movie production and distribu
tion). All these issues can unite intellectuals who are resolutely universal,
that is, who are intent on universalizing the conditions of access to the uni
versal, beyond the boundaries that separate nations, especially those of the
north and south.
To do so, writers, artists, and especially researchers?who, by trade, are
already more inclined and better prepared than those in any other occupa
tion to cross national borders?must transcend the sacred boundary in
scribed in their mind, more or less deeply depending on their national
tradition, between scholarship and commitment, in order to break out of
the academic microcosm, to enter into sustained and vigorous exchange
with the outside world (especially with unions, grassroots organizations,
and issue-oriented activist groups) instead of being content with waging
the "political" battles, at once intimate and ultimate, and always a bit un
real, of the scholastic universe. Today's researchers must invent an improb
able combination: scholarship with commitment, that is, a collective

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 PIERRE BOURDIEU ||| 45

politics of intervention in the political field that follows, as much as possi

ble, the rules that govern the scientific field (rules that those who were in
vited to speak at this session today have given admirable illustrations of, on
the foreign policy of the United States and on the Palestinian question).
Given the mix of urgency and confusion that usually characterizes the
world of political action, this innovation is truly and fully possible only by
and for an organization capable of coordinating the collective work of an
international network of researchers and artists. In this collective enter
prise, the scientists are no doubt the ones who have to shoulder the pri
mary role at a time when the powers that be ceaselessly invoke the
authority of science?the science of economics in particular. But writers
and especially artists also have their contribution to make. "True ideas bear
no intrinsic force," said Spinoza, and the sociologist is not one to dispute
him on this. But sociologists can suggest the unique and indispensable role
that writers and artists can play in the new division of political labor or, to
be more precise, in the new manner of doing politics that needs to be in
vented: to give symbolic force, by way of artistic form, to critical ideas and
analyses. They could, for instance, give a visible and sensible form to the
invisible but scientifically predictable consequences of political measures
inspired by neoliberal philosophy.
I would like, in conclusion, to recall what happened in November 1999
in Seattle. I believe that, being careful not to overestimate that episode, we
can see in it a first and exemplary experiment that can be taken as a point of
departure in devising what might be a new form of international political
action able to transform the achievements of research into efficient symbolic
demonstrations?and devising what might be, more generally, the strategies
of political struggle of a new nongovernmental organization defined by full
commitment to internationalism and full adherence to scholarship.

NOTE =?
This address was translated from the French by Loi'c Wacquant.

WORKS CITED
Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Cont
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

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