Bourdieu, Foucault's critic

Abstract

During many years both were professors at the College de France, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu met regularly on the basis of a real friendship, a common interest in problems of their field and of common interventions in the political field. But they were very different in terms of background, position in the field, intellectual life style, epistemological positions, etc., Foucault never commented upon the work of Bourdieu in writing, while Bourdieu increasingly commented critically on the work of Foucault. In this article an attempt is made to understand this asymmetric relationship, and to specify in detail the issues at stake in the critique of Bourdieu by a close reading of the texts the critique amounts essentially to a critique of the unclarified position of Foucault and other philosophers of that generation, pretending to intervene in the field of the social sciences from an unbroken purely philosophical standpoint. According to Bourdieu, these unclarified aspects in the position of Foucault on matters of knowledge and power contributed to the rise of the present fashion of idealistic socio-constructionistic discourse analysis, which pretends to replace sociology by discourse analysis, as if social phenomena were the same thing as discourses on social phenomena, instead of contributing to a sociology of knowledge that transcends the antinomy between an internalistic and extemalistic history of ideas. It is argued that Bourdieu is right in claiming that his theory of scientific practice and practico-practice, and his theory of the social space relating to relatively autonomous fields and habitus, among them the scientific field, constitutes a more adequate solution for the problem. The exaggerations are not be found in the texts of Foucault, but they have nevertheless a bias which has contributed to the trend.