The Scholastic Point of View Pierre Bourdieu College de France (Note: This text isthe ansriton of Bourdiu's inal address and eejoinder to his sites, Conference on 'Geschmack, Stategien, pakke Sin” ("Tast, Strategies tnd the Logic of Practice), held atthe Freie Universitit, Berlin, 23-24 October 1989, Translated from the French by Loi J.D. Wacquant| My scientific habitus has been exposed to so many stimuli by everyting that has been said that I would have a lotto say, perhaps too much, and that I run the risk of being abit confused and confusing. I would lke to organize my reactions to what Ihave heard around two of three themes. | would like ist to analyze what, borrowing an expression of Austin, I will call the "scholastic point of view," the point of view ofthe sole, that i, the academic vision. What does the fact of thinking within a scholastic space, an ac- demic space, imply? What does our thinking owe tothe fact that itis produced Within an academic space? Isn't our deepest unconscious related to the fact that ‘we think in such an academic space? This would be the first question, From there, I will ry to give some indications on the particular problem (it was present throughout the discussion, particularly around the notion of mimesis but also, obviously, this morning, in the presentation of Jacques Bowveresse (1989) that the understanding of practice poses and which makes for such adi ficult task forthe human sciences. Does the very ambition of understanding prac- tice make any sense? And what is involved in understanding and knowing a prac tice with an approach that is intrinsically theoretical? ‘Then, if time allows, I would like to raise the issue that has been up inthe air since the birth of the social sciences: the problem ofthe relations Between reason and history. Isnt sociology. which apparently undermines the foundations ‘of reason and thereby its own foundations, capable of producing instruments for forging rational discourse and even of offering techniques for waging a polities ‘of reason, a Realpolitik of reason? The scope ofthe problematic | adumbrate here disproportionate tothe time at my disposal, This is why I welcome the idea of "workshop," which fits perfectly what I want ro do and can do today. First point: the “scholastic view.” This isan expression that Austin (1962) ‘uses in passing in Sense and Sensibila and for which he gives an example: the Particular use of language where, instead of grasping and mobilizing the meaning ‘of a word that is immediately compatible with the situation, we mobilize and ex- 0SCHOLASTIC POINT OF VIEW 381 amine all the possible meanings ofthat word, outside of any reference tothe sit- ‘his example is very significant and I think that one can tease out of it the essentials of what the scholastic view is. The scholastic view isa very peculiar point of view on the social world, on language, on any possible object of thought {hat is made possible bythe situation of skhole, of leisure, of which the school— ‘word which also derives from skhol2—is a particular form, as an instutional- ined situation of studious leisure. Adoption of this scholastic point of view i the admission fee, the custom right tacitly demanded by all scholarly fells; the neu- telizing disposition (in Hussr!’s [1983] sense) i, in particular, the condition of. the academic exercise as a pratuitous game, 28 a mental experience that isan end inand of itself believe indeed that we should take Plato's (1973) reflections on shole very seriously and even his famous expression, so often commented upon, spoudaios paizein, “to play seriously." The scholastic point of view of which ‘Austin speaks cannot be separated from the scholastic situation, a socially insti- tuted situation in which one can play seriously and take ludic things seriously. Homo scholasticus or homo academicus i someone who is paid to play seriously; placed outside the urgency ofa practical situation and oblivious tothe ends which are immanent init, he or she earnestly busies herself with problems that serious people ignore—actvely or passively. To produce practices or utterances that are context-free, one must dispose of time, of skholé and also have this disposition to play gratuitous games which is acquired and reinforced by situations of skholE such asthe inclination and the ability to rise speculative problems forthe sole pleasure of resolving them, and not because they are posed, often quite urgently, by the necessities of life, to treat language not as an instrument but as an object of contemplation or speculation ‘Thus what philosophers, sociologists, historians, and ll those whose profes- sion tis to think andor speak about the world have the most chance of overlook ing ar the social presuppositions that are inscribed inthe scholastic point of view, ‘what, to awaken philosophers fom tei slumber, I shall call by the name of scho- lastic doxa or, better, by the oxymoron of epistemic doxa: thinkers leave in a tate ‘of unthought (inpensé, doxa) the presuppositions of their thought, that i, the socal conditions of possiblity ofthe scholastic point of view and the unconscious Aispostion, productive of unconscious theses, which are acquied through an academic or scholastic experience, often insribed in prolongation ofan originary (bourgeois) experience of distance from the world and from the urgency of ne- cxssity In contradistinction wit Plato's (1973) lawyer, of Cicourel’s (1989) physi- cian, we have all the time in the world, all our time, and this freedom from ue gency, from necessity—which often takes the form of economic necessity, due to the convertibility of time into money—is made possible by an ensemble of social and economic conditions, by the existence of these supplies of free time that ac- ‘cumulated economic resources represent (Weber [1978] notes in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft thatthe primary accumulation of political capital appears with the notable when the latter as amassed suficientresoures to be able to leave aside, for atime, the activity that provides his means of subsistence or tohave somebody2 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY ‘replace him). This reminder ofthe economic and social conditions of the scho- lastc posture i not designed to condemn orto instill culpability complex. The logic in whieh I reason is not that of convition or denunciation (the task here is not to judge of this as good or bad) but that of epistemological questioning. This isa fundamental epistemological question since it bears onthe epistemic posture itself, on the presuppositions inscribed inthe fact of thinking the world, of retiring, from the world and from action inthe word inorder to think that action. What ‘we want fo know is in what ways this withdrawal, this retirement, this retreat impact on the thought that they make possible and thereby on what we think, “Thus, for instance, i its true tat the condition of possibility of everything that is produced infield of cultural production (Bourdieu 19832) is this sort of bracketing of temporal emergency and of economic necessity (as can easly be seen in the use of language: I do not use language to do something with it, Tuse language to raise questions about language), if itis true that Tam in a universe which is that of gratitousness, of finality without purpose, of aesthetics, is it not, tnderstandable that I should understand aesthetics so wrongly? Indeed this i, what I wanted to tell Jules Vuillemin yesteday—there are questions that we do not ask ofaestheties because the social condition of possiblity of our aesthetic Aucstioning are already aesthetic, because we forget to question all the nonthetic esthetic presuppositions of all aesthetic theses ‘You may wonder why, being a sociologist, I should play the pat ofthe phi- losopher. Parly, of course, its in homage tomy philosopher fiends who have convened here, But it is also because Iam obliged to do so. [think that to raise such questions on the very nature ofthe scientific gaze is an integral pat of sci- ‘entific work. These questions have been thrust upon me, outside of any intent oF taste for pure speculation, ina numberof research situations where to understand ‘my materials Iwas compelled to reflect upon the scholarly mode of knowledge (Bourdieu 1990a). Thus I discovered that the scholastic vision destroys its object, every time itis applied to practices that are the product ofthe practical view and which, consequently, are very dificult to think of, or are even practically unthink- able for science [believe tat thee i a sort of incompatibility between our scholarly mode of thinking and this strange thing that practice is. To apply to practice a mode of, thinking which presupposes the bracketing of practical necessity and the use of instruments of thought constructed against practice, such as game theory the the- ory of probability etc, to forbid ourselves to understand practice as such, Sc: entiss or scholars whe have not analyzed what ii to bea scientist or a scholat, ‘who have not analyzed what it means to have a scholastic view and to find it nat. tra, put ino the minds of agents heir scholastic view. This epistemocentrcfal- lacy can be found, for instance, in Chomsky (1972), who operates as if ordinary speakers were grammarians. Grammar is atypical product of the scholastic point ‘of view and one could, building on the work of Vygotsky (1962), show that skholt is what allows us to move from primary mastery to secondary mastery of lan- guage, to accedé to the meta: metadiscourse, meta-practice. The fundamental ‘anthropological fallacy consists in injecting meta- into practices. Ths is what‘Chomsky does: this also what Lévi-Strauss (1969) does when he plays on the notion of rue (sce Bourdicu 1986a, 19866). To substitute kinship strategies for Kinship rules isnot to effect a simple, and somewhat gratuitous, philosophical ‘conversion. It is to construct the objet differently, to ask different questions of informants, to analyze marriages differently. Instead of being content with re- cording, via genealogies, marriages reduced to a kinship relation between spouses, I must gather foreach wedding al the data—and there are alot of them — that may have entered, consciously oF unconsciously, in the strategies: the age difference between spouses, differences in wealth, material and symbolic, be- ‘ween the two families, the legacy of past conomic and political relations, et. ‘And I must in particular treat kinship exchanges quite differently. Where Lévi- ‘Strauss sees an algebra, we must see a symbolic economy. And to effect this the- ‘retical conversion, we must take a theoretical point of view on the theoretical point of view; we must realize thatthe anthropologist is not, when faced with ‘marriage, inthe postion ofthe head of household who wishes to marry his daugh- ter, and to marry her well. The anhropotogist brackets ll practical interests and stakes, This is rather obvious in the case ofthe ethnographer working in a forcign culture: her situation as an outsider suffices to put her ina quasi-theoreical,quasi- ‘scholastic point of view. For the sociologist, however, itis much less obvious and the can easily forget the gap that separates the intrest that he may have in the school system as a scholar who simply wants to understand and to explain, and ‘that consequently leads him to seta “pure” gaze on the functioning ofthe mech- anisms of differential elimination according to cultural capital, and the interest ‘that he has inthis same system when he acts as a father concerned withthe future of his children. The anthropologist, just like the sociologist, aims at an under- standing that sits own end, this because, as we sometimes say, “ils n'en ont rien a faire,” “they have no use fort; they ae, in a sens, indifferent ro the game they study. The very idea of matrimonial strategy and of interest (the interest in ‘maximizing the material or symbolic profits obtained through marriage) imme- diately comes to mind when You start thinking as an agent acting within cultural traditions where the brunt of processes of accumulation or dilapidation of (eco nomic or symbolic) capital work themselves out via matrimonial exchanges. We have come along way from the algebrast anthropologist who draws up geneal- ‘ies inthe hope of establishing rules for which he has no use in practice ‘The same applies to myth ort ritual, and ina way @fortior. Following the Durkhicim and Mauss (1963) of Primitive Classification, Lévi-Strauss (1968) has ‘caused anthropology to make immeasurable progress by striving to capture the logic of mythical naratives or ritual acts. But, to stay in line with curent repre- Sentations of science, he borrowed his instruments of knowledge from the side of algebra—and from the mathematician Andeé Weiland he built formal systems that, though they account for practices, in no way provide the raison dé of practices, ther true explanatory principle. I is only on condition that we take up the point of view of practice—on the basis of a theoretical reflection om the the- retical point of view as scholastic point of view, asa nonpractcal point of view, founded upon the neutralization of practical interests and practical stakes—that384 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY we have some chance of grasping the truth ofthe specific logic f practice. Ritual, ction, which structural anthropology situates onthe side of algebra, isin facta _2ymnastics ora dance (one goes fom right olf, or from left to right, one throws above the lft or the right shoulder) and follows a practical logic, that is, a logic ‘hats imtelligible, coherent, but only upto a certain point beyond which it would no longer be“ practical”), and oriented toward practical ends, that is, the actual- ization of wishes, of desires (of life o of death) and, through them, ofthe socal structures that have produced these dispositions. Here again, the change inthe theory of practice provoked by theoretical reflection on the theoretical point of View. on the practical point of view, and on thei profound differences, isnot purely speculative: i is accompanied by a drastic change inthe practical opera- tions of research and by quite tangible scientific profits. For instance, one is led {0 pay attention to properties of ritual practice that struturalistlogicism would Incline to push aside orto teat as meaningless misirings ofthe mythical algcbra, and particularly to polysemic realities, underdetermined or indeterminate, not 10 speak of partial contradictions and ofthe fuzziness that pervade the whole system and account for its Rexibility. its openness, in short everything that makes it proctcal” and thus geared 0 respond at the least cos (in particular in terms of logical search) to the emergencies of ordinary existence and practice (see “Tere sisible Analogy” in Bourdieu 19903:200-270), Inshort, to play on a famous tile of Rye"s, I would say that ignoring every= thing thai implicated inthe “scholastic point of view" leads to the most serious epistemological mistake inthe socialsciences, namely, that which consists in put- ting a scholar inside the machine," in picturing all social agents in the image of the scientist (ofthe sientist reasoning on human practice and not ofthe acting scientist, the scientist in ation) or, more precisely, to place the models that the scientist must construct to account for practices into the consciousness of agent, to operate as ifthe constructions thatthe scientist must produce to understand practices, to account for them, were the main determinants, the atual cause of practices. The rational calculator thatthe advocates of Rational Action Theory portray asthe principle of human practices is no less absurd—even if tis does not strike us as much, perhaps because it ates our spiritual point of honoe""— than the angelus rector, the fat-seeing pilot to which some pre-Newtonian think rs attributed the regulated movement ofthe planets. ‘One would need hereto push the analysis futher and to track down all the sciemtfc mistakes that derive from what could be called the scholastic fallacy, such asthe fat of asking interviewees to be their own sociologists (as with all {questions ofthe type: "According to you, how many social clases are there?"") for lack of having questioned the questionnaire or, beter, the situation of the ‘questionnaire designer who has the leisure othe privilege to tear herself away from the evidences of doxa to raise questions. Or worse: the fact of asking survey respondents questions to which they can always respond by yes or no but which they do not raise and could not ask themselves (that i, truly produce as such) unless they were predisposed and prepared by ther social conditions of existence to take up a “scholastic point of view" on the social world (asin so many ques-SCHOLASTIC POINT OF VIEW 385 tions of political theory). We would also need to uncover all the unnoticed theo- retical effects produced by the mere use of instruments of thought that, having been produced ina "scholastic situation,” reproduce in their functioning the pre- suppositions inscribed in the social conditions of their construction, such asthe bracketing of time, of temporal urgency, oF the philosophy of gratuitousness, of the neutralization of practical ends, Ici at this juncture, for instance, that we would have to question, in the perspective pu frth by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Walff (1989), the effects ‘produced, in and through ther very use, by the most ordinary instruments of the ‘scholarly tradition: writing, as shown bythe operation of recording and transcrib- ing of an interview ora dialogue, effects or makes posible a synchronization of the successive moments inthe linear unfolding of discourse, thereby creating the conditions of possibilty (as we see with Socrates) ofthe logical critique of ar- _zumentation but tending also, when we forget these effects, to destroy this fun- ‘damental property of practice or of speech: their embeddedness in duration, (For instance, the structural analysis of a poem, which synchronizes successive mo- ‘ments, often thanks to the use ofa spatial schema, causes an essential property of reading to disappear, namely, tha it unfolds in time, which makes it possible to create effects of surprise as frustrated expectation, etc.) Likewise, by simul the successive moments of social processes, all he techniques that the ethnographer routinely utilizes, such as the two-by-two table analyzed by Jack Goody (1977) of, more generally, genealogies, kill the properly strategic dimen- sion of practices which is related tothe existence, at every moment, of uncertain- ties, indeterminations, if ony subjective ones. In sum, we must carry outa veri- {able critique of scholarly or Scholastic reason to uncover the inellectuais bias that is inscribed inthe most ordinary instruments of intellectual work (we would have to include also mathematical signs) and inthe posture which isthe tact con- ition of their production and oftheir utilization ‘When we unthinkingly put to work our most ordinary modes of thinking — ll those, for instance, which underpin the most elemental logical operations — we inflict upon our object fundamental adulteration (as we see very clearly today when we tr to apply logic to natural languages), which can goal the way to pure and simple destruction and that remains unnoticed as such, The same is true when we apply beyond thei conditions of historical or social validity (leading to an- achronism orto class ethnocentrism) concepts that, as Kant (1952) put it, seem to “pretend to universal validity” because they ae produced in particular con- tions whose particularity eludes us. How could we not see—to be more Kantian ‘than Kant, and than my friend Jules Vuillemin (1989)—that the disinterested ‘game of sensitiveness, the pure exercise ofthe faulty of fel, in short, the so- called transcendental use of sensitivity presupposes historical and social condi- tions of possibilty and that aesthetic pleasure, this pure pleasure which “every ‘man ought tobe able to experience," ithe privilege of those who have had access to the conditions in which such a “pure” disposition can be durably constituted? ‘What do we do, for instance, when we tlk of a “popular aesthetics" or ‘when we want at all Costs to credit the “people (le peuple), who do not cae to385 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY have one, witha “popular culture"? Forgetting to effect the époché ofthe social ‘conditions ofthe époché of practical interests that we effect when we pass a pure ‘aesthetic appreciation, we purely and simply universalize the particular case in Which we are placed or, to speak abit more roughly, we, in an unconscious and ‘thoroughly theoretical manner, grant the economic and socal privilege that is the precondition of the pure and universal aesthetic point of view to all men and ‘women (and in particular to this good old peasant, capable of appreciating, like tus, the beauty ofa landscape, orto the black subproletarian capable of appreci- ting the rhythm or appeal of a rap melody). Most ofthe human works that we are accustomed to treating as universal—Iaw, science, the fine ars, ethics, rl gion, etc.—cannot be disassociated from the scholastic point of view and from the social and economic conditions which make the later possible. They have been engendered in these very peculiar social universes that the fields of cultural production re—the religious field, the artistic fed, the philosophical field (Bour- dieu 1983a, 1983, 1990e)—and in which agents are engaged who have in com ‘mon the privilege of fighting for the monopoly ofthe universal, and thereby ef fectivelyto cause truths and values that are held, at each moment, tobe universal, nay eternal, fo advance. Tam ready to concede that Kant’s aesthetics is true, but only as a phenom= nology of the aesthetic experience of all the people who are the product of skholE. That ist say, the experience of the beautiful of which Kant offers us a rigorous description has definite economic and social conditions of possibility that ate ignored by Kant and whose universal anthropological possibility of which Kant adumbrates an analysis could become rel only if those economic and social conditions were universally allocated. It means also that the condition of actual ‘universaization of this (theoretical) universal possibility is thus the actual univer- salization of the economic and social conditions, that is, of skhole, which, being ‘monopolized by some today, confer upon them the monopoly aver the universal To drive the point home and atthe rsk of appearing overly insstent—but in such matters, its so easy to havea light touch—I would say tat the datum from “which sociological reflection stars isnot the universal capacity to grasp the beat~ ‘fl but the incomprehension, the indifference, nay the disgust of some social agents (deprived ofthe adequate categories of perception and appreciation) in the face of certain objects consecrated as beautiful (the “beau clasique”” for in- stance; cf. Bourdieu 1984). And to recall the socal conditions of possibilty of this judgment that claims universal validity lead to citcumscribe the pretensions to universality of Kantian analysis: we may grant the Critique of Judgement lim ited validity as a phenomenological r, forthe pleasure of shocking, ethnometh- ‘dologcal) analysis ofthe lived experience of certain cultivated men and women in certain historical societies, and we can describe very precisely the decidedly nontranscendental genesis ofthis experience. But only to add immediately that the unconscious universalzarion of the particular case which it effects (by ignor ing its own social conditions of possibility or, to be Kantian to the end, its own limits) has the effet of constituting a particular experience of the work of ct (or ‘of the world, as with the idea of “natural beauty") as @ universal norm ofSCHOLASTIC POINT OF VIEW 387 possible aesthetic experience, and thus of tacitly egiimizing a particular form of experience and, thereby, those who have the privilege of access tit. On the basis ‘ofthese analyses, one could show that the “purest” concepts of aesthetic judg- ‘ment (“beautiful “sublime,” et.) have an ineseapably political dimension and that aesthetic debates conceal more or les effectively propery political opposi- tions between antagonistic positions within the artistic or intellectual field and, beyond it, in the social field as a whole, (Its the case fr instance withthe debates on decline and democratic taste which have been evoked here, or onthe dispro= Portonate and the sublime, and which often combine social antagonisms with ‘ational antagonisms, between France and Germany in particular.) ‘What is true of pure aesthetic experience is true ofall the anthropological possibilities that we tend to think of as universal: the ability to produce a complex chain of logical reasoning or the ability to accomplish a perfectly rigorous moral act are, by way of anthropological possibilities, virtually granted to everybody and no one can maintain that they area prior reserved for some. And yet they remain the privilege ofa happy few because these anthropological potentialities find ther full realization only under definite social and economic conditions; and because, inversely, there are economic and social conditions under which they become atrophied, annulled. This isto say that one cannot, atthe same time, ‘denounce the inhuman social conditions of existence imposed upon proletarian and subprotetarians, especially in the black ghettos ofthe United States and else- ‘where, and credit the people placed in such situations with the full secomplish- ‘ment oftheir human potentialities, and in particular with the gratuitous and dis- interested dispositions that we tacitly or explicitly inscribe in notions such as those fof "culture" oF “aesthetics.” In this case, the commendable concer to rehabi- late (by showing, as I did for instance a longtime ago, thatthe photographs taken bby members ofthe working class pursue an immanent intention which hs its own coherence, its own logic, its justifiation—which sill does no entitle us to speak of anaesthetics [Bourdicu ct al. 1990)) can end up yielding the opposite result there is a mannet, quite comfortable in shor, of respecting the people" which consists in confining them to what they are, in pushing them further down, as we could say, by converting deprivation and hardship into an elective choice. The roltkult is form of essetialism, forthe same reason asthe clas racism which reduces popular practices to barbarity (and of which it often is nothing more than the mere inversion, and a falsely radical one at that indeed, it offers all the ben- clits of apparent subversion, of “radical chic,” while atthe same time leaving ‘everything ass, the ones with their actually cultured culture and a culture capable ‘of sustaining its own questioning, the others with their decisively and fctiiously rehabilitated culture). 1 understand Labov (1973) when he purports to show that the dialect ofthe residents of black ghettos can convey theological tuths as subtle ‘and sophisticated as do the knowingly euphemized discourses of the graduates of Harvard University it remains, however, thatthe most hazy and fuzzy wterances ‘of the latter open all doors in society whereas the most unpredictable linguistic inventions of the former remain totally devoid of value on the market ofthe school and in all socal situations of the same nature. (This does not mean that we needS88 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY to accept the quas-estentialist description that Basil Bernstein [1973] gives of popular language.) Populist aesteticism is yet another one ofthe effets, no ‘doubt one ofthe most unexpected, of scholastic bias since i operates a tacit univ- cesalization ofthe scholastic pont of view which is by no means accompanied by the will to unversalize the conditions of possibility ofthis point of view. Thus, we must acknowledge that if everything leads us to think that certain fundamental dispositions toward the world, certain fundamental modes of con struction of reality—aestheti, scientific, et — constitute universal anthropolog- ical possibilities, these potentialities are actualized only in definite conditions and that these conditions, stating with skhole as distance from necessity and urgeney, and especially academic skhol® and the whole accumulated product of prior sole that it carries, are unevenly allocated across civilizations, from the Tro brand Islands tothe United States of today, and within our own societies, across socal clases or ethnic groups or, in a more rigorous language, across positions in socal space. These ae all very simple things but very fundamental ones, and itis not superfluous to insist on them, especially in a scholastic situation, that i, among people ready to join inthe forgetting ofthe presuppositions inscribed in their common privilege. This simple observation leads uso an ethical or political, program that is itself very simple: we can escape the alternative of populism and ‘conservatism, two forms of essentalsm which tend to consecrate the status quo, ‘only by working to universalize the conditions of access universality But to give a concrete and precise content to this kind of slogan that has a least the virtue of being clear and rigorous and to put us on notice against populist, make-believe, we would need to reintroduce the whole analysis ofthe genesis of the specifi structure ofthese quite peculiar social worlds where the universal is engendered and that I cal ilds. I believe indeed that thee isa social history of reason, which is coextensive with the history ofthese social microcosms where the social conditions of the development of reason are engendered (Bourdieu 19906). Reason is historical through and through, which does not mean that itis for that matter relative and reducible to history. The history of reason i the pe clit history of the genesis of these peculiar social universes that, having for prerequisite skholé and for foundation scholastic distance from necessity (and from economic necessity in particular) and urgency, offer conditions propitious tothe development of a form of social exchange, of competition, even of struggle, ‘which are indispensable forthe development of certain anthropological potenti ities. To make you understand, I will say tht if those universes are propitious to the development of reason, it is because, in order to make the most of Yourself in them, you must make the most of reason; to triumph in them, you must make arguments, demonstrations, refutation triumph in them. To be recognized, that is, symbolically efficient in these universes, the “pathological motivations about which Kant (1950) wites must be converted into logical motives. These social universes that, in some ways, are ik ll other universes, with their powers, their monopoles, their interests and so on, are, in other ways, very different, exceptional, if nt a bit miraculous and, being born of a considerable historical work, they remain very fragile, very vulnerable, atthe merey of authoritarian[SCHOLASTIC POINT OF VIEW 389 governments as we saw in Germany or Russia. It remains thatthe soc tions of their functioning, the tacitly or explicitly imposed rues of competition in them are such thatthe most “pathological” functions are obliged to mold them= selves into socal forms and social formalisms, to submit themselves to regulated procedures and processes, notably in matters of discussion and confrontation, to ‘obey standards that accord with what is seen at each moment in history, as rea- son, The scientific fed, this Scholastic universe where the most brutal constraints ofthe ordinary social world are bracketed, is the locus ofthe genesis of a new form of necessity o constraint or, if you want, of a specific legality, an Eigen sgesetlichkeit ini the logical constraints, whose specificity Bouveresse (1989) tried to uncover this moming, take the form of social constaints—and con- versely. Inscribed into minds in te form of dispositions aequred via the isci- plines ofthe Scientific City (and, more simply, through the acquisition of state- ‘of-the-art methods and knowledge), they are also inscribed inthe objectivity of the scientific field in the form of institutions such as procedures and processes of Aliscussion, refutation, and regulated dialogue and especially, perhaps, in the form ‘of positive and negative sanctions thatthe field, functioning as a market, inflicts ‘upon individual products "This i to say in passing that there is no need to wrench ourselves fre from the embrace of relativism, to inscribe the universal structures of eason, no longer in consciousness but in language, by way of a revived form of the transcendental illusion, Habermas (1981) stops his efforts in mideourse when he seks a way out ‘ofthe historcist circle to which the social sciences seem to condemn themselves in the social sciences (and in particular in Grie’s principles). The sociological ‘constructivism that I propose allows us to account forthe tanscendance of (math- ‘ematical, artistic, scientific, etc.) works which are engendered in scholarly fields and which are tested through the constraint discussed by Bouveresse, and to ac ‘count also forthe Platonic illusion which canbe found, under different guises, in all these fields, We must, by taking hstoicst reduction o its logical conclusion, seek the origin of reason not ina human “faculty,” tht is, amature, but inthe ‘very history ofthese peculiar social microcosms in which agents strugale, in the ‘name of the universal, forthe legitimate monopoly over the universal, and in the progressive instiutionalization of a dialogical language which owes its seemingly intrinsic properties othe socal condition fits genesis and ofits utilization. This, analysis allows us to move past the moralism ofthe glorification of rational dia- logue toward a genuine Realpolitik of reason (Bourdieu 1987, 1989). Indeed, 1 ‘think that, short of believing in miracles, we can expect the progress of reason ‘only from a permanent struggle to defend and promote the social conditions that fare most favorable tothe development of reason, that i, institutions of research and teaching no less than scientific journals, the diffusion and defense of books ‘of quality, the denunciation of censorship, academic or otherwise, et., thus from renewing a great tradition of philosophy_-and especially German philosophy — ‘hich didnot disdain to incamateits struggle forthe development ofthe human spirit in grand educational projects aimed at endowing reason and freedom with the properly political instruments which are the precondition oftheir realization inhistory.90 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY References Cited Austin, Joba L. 1962. Sense and Seasibilia. Reconstuced from Manuscript Notes by G. J. Wamock. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Bertin, Bai 1973. Clas, Codes, and Cont. Volume I. 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