Philosophy and Social Science: Introducing Bourdieu and Passeron

I have in a sense been given the task of introducing what is going to happen here. The first question that we might put is immense: it’s what are the Human Sciences, since everyone talks about them, everyone seems to know what they are, but in fact when you put the question to people, they have trouble coming up with an answer. We all have trouble coming up with an answer, so I don’t want to talk for too long; well, that’s where we are. The Human Sciences, the field currently known as Human Sciences, is a highly problematic field, which means it is a field in search of its own definition, what does it cover, or in other words, what is the breadth of the field of Human Sciences. As soon as we ask this question we come up against the problem of the Human Sciences, that is to say you come up against the problematic nature of Human Sciences themselves. We might say, in fact, that currently there are two conceptions of the Human Sciences, one broad and one narrow one. In a bookshop recently I saw a small volume, a little booklet, put out by a publishing house that publishes documents focusing on questions of practices, and there was a little booklet titled ‘Human Sciences’. I opened it, and read ‘Human Geography, Political Economy, Social Psychology’. So if you want the narrow definition of the Human Sciences, there you are. There’s a broader definition which is in search of itself, and that is the definition enshrined in the title of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, and the conjunction of these two terms puts the problem in a nutshell. Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences; because the Faculty of Letters is titled ‘Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences’ it poses the problem – in other words it proposes a broad definition; it considers that the Human Sciences should cover the field previously known as the Letters.

So we find ourselves faced with two definitions that define the extent of the concept: a narrow definition and a broad one. Why do we have both a narrow and a broad definition? If we put the question from the point of view of the title ‘Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences’, what constituted the old field of Letters in relation to what might currently be the same field, which was to become the field of Human Sciences? What is the former field of Letters? It is the field covered by all that was taught in the Faculty of Letters, which is to say essentially: French literature, classical literature, Latin, Greek, History, Geography, Philosophy and all the sub-disciplines of philosophy, such as history of philosophy, logic and epistemology, morals, sociology, psychology, etc. So when we hear the term ‘Letters’ we know we are dealing with a general domain that is ultimately concerned with everything related to human productions in one way or another. Obviously there are other human productions that are not covered by the Faculty of Letters and which are nevertheless human, such as Law which belongs to the Faculty of Law, Medicine that belongs to the Faculty of Medicine; I leave aside Pharmacology, which is something of a special case, but ultimately can be attached to Medicine if we wish. So that is basically what constitutes the Human Sciences.

And I can tell you straight away that there is already a difficulty, which is that with the Faculty of Letters we’re going to encounter the problem of the conflict between faculties – it will bring back old Kantian memories. The Faculty of Letters does not cover all of the fields that could be considered relevant to a science of man; in other words it doesn’t cover all of the objects that could be considered to be produced by humans in their human activity as humans. However that may be, it is already interesting to note that this distinction exists, and it’s already interesting to pose the problem just at the level of the Faculty of Letters. So, the Faculty of Letters. What, then, were ‘Letters’, before the little phrase ‘Human Sciences’ was added to the term ‘Letters’? According to ancient tradition, the Letters were the Humanities, a very old tradition going back, I think, to medieval education, and to its renewal in what we may call either the revolution or the reaction of humanism in the 14th and 15th centuries which followed, in Europe and in France particularly. What were the Humanities? They were essentially dominated by a conception of the Letters: it was a conception, as it were, of Letters as so-called literary objects, that is, objects considered as products of humans in their activity – a conception dominated by rhetoric. In the Middle Ages, as you know, everything was dominated by rhetoric. What does rhetoric mean, what is rhetoric? Rhetoric is two things – I don’t want to enter into detailed analysis, I’ll just cut to the summary – rhetoric is two things, firstly knowing how to speak, and secondly knowing how to appreciate those who speak. In other words, the Humanities were essentially the study of existing works, works of art, essentially, literary works, essentially – that is a capacity to transform existing works, that is a capacity for appreciating and consuming existing works, literary works, all literary works, whether philosophical, aesthetic, purely literary, poetic, etc., historical and others, on the one hand, and on the other the capacity to reproduce them oneself. Rhetoric is knowing how to speak and knowing how to appreciate those who speak; it is the same thing, knowing how to speak and knowing how to appreciate people speaking. In other words, the Humanities in the deepest sense of the term was essentially an art. An art in the sense in which the word was understood at that time, the art of writing, or the art of studying masterpieces, or else the art of reading books. When Montaigne writes essays, he puts the Humanities, in the proper sense of the term, into practice, which is to say that he knows both how to read what others have written, to appreciate what others have written, and apply it to his own life, on the one hand, and, on the other, to reproduce himself reflections which are ultimately of the same kind, and will be of service to other men, just as the texts by Plutarch that he has read are of service to him.

So it’s a practice, an art. The Humanities is essentially not the science of a practice but the technique of a practice. The technique of a practice in the precise sense of offering recipes both for savouring existing works, existing works of art, making use of them in one’s own life, and for producing them on occasion, if one is capable of doing so. That is what the Humanities are. So if we ask what are the basic categories governing this technique of a practice of consumption and reproduction, we see – well, I can’t demonstrate it but it’s fairly simple, that the essential categories are the aesthetic, ethical and religious categories: it’s quite clear, works of art are considered as a source both of aesthetic enjoyment, it’s their beauty that arouses our interest, and are also received, as it were, as a lesson in moral practice. When Montaigne reads Plutarch, he quite simply compares one man’s experience of life to his own experience, and he places them in parallel, and then he draws an equation from it, that’s the Essays. So it is governed at once by aesthetics, by morals and by religion, which is a form of morals, the form in which morals were presented over a very long period of human history. As you can see, it has nothing to do with science, and the Humanities as understood in that sense define both, as it were, a domain of objects and the art of maintaining living relationships, concrete relationships with them, that is to say the art of consuming them, appreciating them, judging them, the art of applying them to one’s own life, understood as aesthetic life, moral life, religious life or political life, and so on, that is to practical life on the one hand, and also the art of reproducing such objects from time to time, the art of doing the same – that is rhetoric and those are the essential categories that govern all of this field.

So clearly for anyone who wants to create a science of culture today, in other words anyone who would like to create a science of the same objects today, it is clear that he must a priori reject these categories, that is, he must question all the implicit categories that govern this field, he must question, in order to be able to create a science, the fact that this entire domain is governed at once by moral values, aesthetic values and religious values. It is quite clear. Not in the least to suggest that these values are worthless, but to make the values themselves an object of his reflection, to consider as it were the scientific study of this entire domain both in terms of its objects and in terms of the categories and the values that governed it during the time when it was known as the Letters, in other words the Humanities. So the problem is to create a science of it. Because these Humanities, these Letters, become Human Sciences – how to make a science of them. Why this need to create a science? Why does this domain which was the domain of objects of consumption to which were attached techniques of consumption, and of production, and use, and so on, need to be transformed, why do we need to create a science of it?

We could say, for example, cooking is also an object of consumption, it is also a cultural phenomenon. French cuisine is obviously a cultural phenomenon, just as Chinese cuisine is, and so on. There are treatises on cooking; in other words, it is possible to find out how to prepare dishes, there is a culinary rhetoric; there are also books on gastronomy, some of which have great aesthetic value. Culinary taste can give rise to abstract theoretical developments, but however that may be, the relationship maintained in this field is a relationship of consumption, of taste on the one hand, and on the other of production and reproduction. Culinary research is possible. One of the archdukes who served in times gone by in this house had as his great project a plan to create a national institute of culinary research, ¹ didn’t he? His basic idea was that you could draw extraordinary resources from the use of blotting paper in cooking. That’s another question, but what I mean is that one can very easily conceive of that. That is to say, the relationship that exists, as it were, between rhetoric and the Humanities is a relationship of the same order. Forgive me for lowering the dignity of these objects by this comparison, but after all Plato uses comparisons of the same order when he wonders what is the relationship between rhetoric and sophism on the one hand, or between the taste for beauty – and then he even talks, I think, also of cooking. Which means that comparison is not reasoning, but you can see the kind of relationship that is established. So if we want to create a science of this defined domain – let us call it the domain of the Humanities – it is clear that the perspective alters radically, and that it is no longer a matter of consumption, of taste, of potential reproduction, etc., of the objects in question, but of who would create the science of this entire domain. And this is the project at the core of that simple expression ‘Human Sciences’, in the phrase ‘Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences’. It must be transformed into a scientific field. Why? Because that need has been identified. It is a cultural, historical phenomenon that I don’t have to explain here: why do people undertake to create a science of History, a science of Societies, scientific sociology, scientific psychology, a scientific theory of Law, and so on – I don’t need to justify this, it is a fact, that is how it is.

Here, then, we are faced with this task, and this is where we come up once more against the two definitions I mentioned earlier, the narrow field and the broad field of human sciences. In law, one might say, when the Faculty of Letters inscribes in its title ‘Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences’, in law it is asserting, it is positing in principle that a broad definition of the Human Sciences is essential. In fact when we ask what is the domain covered by the Human Sciences today, we come upon the little booklet I was talking about earlier, where it talks of human geography, political economy and social psychology. In other words it does not include literary history, it does not include sociology of culture, it does not include sociology of law, it does not include the science of the history of ideologies, it does not include the science of history of science, it does not include the science of history of philosophy, etc. etc., and it does not include the science of history of moral ideology, religious ideology, etc. There is therefore a contradiction. What does this contradiction mean? It means, simply, that the programme has not yet been filled out, that we have only just begun to fill out the programme and that there’s still a vast area to be covered. What does this mean? It means that by rights, the Human Sciences should cover the entirety of the field formerly known as the field of Letters-Humanities, but that in fact there is only a small domain that has been adapted to the scientific method, and that the rest remains to be adapted.

So there you have the general context for what is about to happen here, and what is about to happen here concerns sociology. Sociology is more or less included in the field that is considered to be already opened up, already constituted as a scientific field – more or less, because not everyone agrees that the matter is resolved, that sociology has become scientific. The same question is being asked again in relation to sociology – that is, by rights, it should become a science, and the issue is to know whether or not it is in fact a science. So now, in a sense, I am going to attempt very quickly not to answer the question, but to pose the problem in terms that are a bit more precise, a bit more rigorous: can we say that sociology as it is today is a science?

Here there are two ways of posing the question, in a sense: we can put the question in terms of the de facto state of things, that is the actual situation in sociology, as it is now, and we can put it in terms of a de jure definition. In other words, the first question can be formulated in this way: we will look at how sociology is now, and then we will ask, is sociology, as it is, scientific? That is the first question; that is the first way of posing the problem. There is another way of posing the problem, which is to put the following question: what does a science need to be in order to be science? In other words, to describe the concept, to develop the concept of a science. It is clear that bowling is not a science; it is obvious that physics is a science. It is clear that cooking is not a science – even treatises on cooking are not a science, and so on. What is a science? Well, once there is basic agreement about what constitutes a science, then we will be able to put the question of knowing whether sociology in its current form is sufficient to say that sociology corresponds to the concept of a science. That is the second question. I don’t have time to expand on this: I will just, as it were, offer a few points of reference in relation to these two questions.

Question one: what is the current state of sociology, how does it present itself today? Well, I would say that it presents itself in three forms. It presents itself in the form of an abstract and general theory; it presents itself in the form of ethnology, and it presents itself in the form of empirical sociology. Three forms, then; so I will say a few words about each of these forms. Sociology today presents itself in the form of abstract and general theories, for example, Monsieur Gurvitch. ² Long tradition has it that sociology is a science developed from the work of Auguste Comte, Durkheim, Mauss, etc., that is, the work of philosophers who developed philosophical theories about sociology. In France today, in 1963, sociology is essentially the whole development of this theoretical tradition, a pure, abstract theoretical tradition – in other words Durkheim, Mauss, etc. etc., going back to Auguste Comte. We can also say that a Marxist sociology might be possible in the same way; in other words, that on the basis of Marx, a whole abstract sociological theory could be developed which would say: here are the concepts in terms of which the reality of society should be thought. Such a sociology does exist, more or less, that is to say on the Marxist side – well, Gurvitch can say that he is a Marxist – that is a different question. In short, if you are looking for the model of abstract theory, in France it is Gurvitch. It is worth pointing out that this exists mainly in France, it isn’t found in English-speaking countries, they don’t have this abstract theoretical tradition, they are rather bothered by it. When Mr. Lazarsfeld, ³ who is American by adoption, came last year to France to teach a seminar on the critique of empirical sociology, a seminar at the Sorbonne, he talked about empirical sociology because nothing else exists in America. There is no theoretical tradition. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The second form in which sociology currently exists, ethnology – well, that goes back a long way, and I will say straight away that I am indebted to Bourdieu and Passeron for understanding that: I think it’s something that should be known, it’s crucial. The fact is that the most concrete, the most precise, the most authentic current form of sociology is what can be called ethnology. Ethnology proposes a model for understanding social realities which in the first place is already constituted, which has a long history, and possesses considerable theoretical virtues. What is ethnology – or, we might ask, what is the type of behaviour, what is the typical behaviour of the ethnologist in relation to the abstract theoretician? If you like, ethnology would be Lévi-Strauss when he was working in the field: he spent, I don’t know, one or two years of his life there, he has ethnological analyses in his work; or it would be all the fellows who go to Africa and describe what happens in a particular primitive society. In a sense, after Lévi-Strauss’s ⁴ comparative ethnology, it is certain chapters of Tristes Tropiques, when Lévi-Strauss says: ‘I went to be with such-and-such a tribe, I spent three months there, this is what I saw, I lived with that tribe, this is what I observed.’ Ethnology is what Bourdieu did in Algeria. He spent a year and a half in Kabylia, well, long, long periods living with people in the place; in other words he lived in the thing he was analysing. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this practice? The advantages of this practice are that it offers a direct contact with reality, so it’s not abstract – that’s the first advantage. It is irreplaceable, everyone will tell you that you should not imagine what a primitive society is – you have to live within it.

The second advantage is that by living within it one gains a perception, if you like, of the Gestalt of the society: that is, one gains a perception of the real overall elements of the society. In other words, one sees what are the real overall articulations of the society. One sees things as they come into being, one cannot be mistaken. One sees what belongs to family relations, to kin relations, one sees what the economic life is, one sees what the political life is, one sees what the ideology is, etc. In other words, one reaches a more or less direct perception – pay attention as this poses another problem – of the real structure of this concrete object that we seek to analyse scientifically. In some ways the points of articulation are visible, and that’s the ethnologist’s ideal, it’s at the surface, it’s to see the articulations that constitute the essential theoretical articulations of any scientific object. Even in the Platonic tradition the object must be clearly delineated, there must be no mistake: you must not cut a bone in the middle of the tibia, it must be cut at the joint. The ethnologist is in the situation where, living in direct contact with societies, he does indeed see the real structure and divisions. This is not only true of primitive societies, but Bourdieu and Passeron explained to me that it was extraordinarily fruitful in, for example, what might be called rural sociology. And it is a fact that anyone who lives in the country immediately sees the divisions, sees, as it were, the human, social, family, etc., reality, the economic activity, the legal formulations, etc., even in the description of fields. You know what Bourdieu said: it is true that books have been written on this; Sereni, ⁵ for example, who is an Italian historian and sociologist who made his career by writing an extraordinary book on the Italian landscape. You know that there have also been books on enclosures, that is, the way the fields are constituted, the way the land is divided up. Even the division of the land as a social division – meaning, of men – renders visible human division, in other words, the essential articulations of society. The fact that the Italian landscape differs from the Breton landscape and that the Breton landscape is different from that of northern France, with fields separated by hedges or on the contrary unfenced land, is a visible indication of the social structure. I won’t harp on about it – all this is very simple.

So I shall point straight away to the major disadvantage: it is that this has given rise to a whole canon and this is the most real, the most scientific, the most authentic literature that exists. Scientifically this poses a problem, because it is a fact that ethnologists manage very well, they do wonderful things when they are dealing with primitive societies, in other words small entire societies where they can see everything at once and where they see all the articulations with their own eyes. They are visible, perceptible, to the naked eye in the Aristotelian sense, rather than the Galilean sense of the term. For Galileo the articulations are not visible. In the Aristotelian sense of the term they are visible. What I mean to say is that, for ethnologists, this approach works, fits well with primitive societies or with certain forms of human existence such as, for example, rural life, because it is still relatively primitive, it can be seen. In other words, one can see the divisions in the field. But once we are dealing with much more complex societies such as modern society, it becomes strictly impossible. How could one, as it were, have a visual, direct perception of the Gestalts that effectively constitute the articulations of modern society – that is to say, modern industrial society? Even if it is planned, it is absolutely impossible, it is not visible to the naked eye, it is not by living within the society that you will understand things: it will be no good you spending two years living in the stock exchange, will it, you will see the way the stock exchange works, the shares are transferred, etc., and you will understand nothing about it. Whereas the ethnologist who goes to live even for only three months in a primitive society sees the articulations. So the Gestalts are not visible, we have to use other methods. So this is the limitation of ethnology, of ethnological practice: at the same time, ethnological practice is something very real. In some cases the auto-ethnological method is the only one possible, the only one that is productive, and it is really productive.

The third form in which sociology exists today is what I call empirical sociology. What we might call empirical sociology is a consecrated term: what is it? Empirical sociology is precisely a scientific attempt meant to fill the gaps of ethnology. In relation to a global society like ours, an ethnologist, ethnological perception, is not possible. We need to identify the articulations not by observation or by experiencing them – simply by discovering them by living within is not possible – but by indirect methods. It is in this sense that empirical sociology can be considered a discipline that attempts to formulate this fundamental theoretical lacuna. Empirical sociology is the great project of modern times. It is what is being developed everywhere now. It began in America, it is being developed in France. We might note that there were forerunners in France – Halbwachs was one such, one of the founders of empirical sociology – you agree? No? More or less? Yes? In short there is an equally empirical French tradition, and so on – it is the great project. What is empirical sociology? It is a discipline that calls itself scientific; whether it is or not is another question. In short it calls itself scientific and it attempts precisely to use Galilean methods for objects that are not directly perceptible, whose structure is not directly perceptible – that is, it attempts to discover the essence of visible phenomena, the invisible essence of visible phenomena by employing indirect methods, exactly as does physics, as did Galilean physics. And these methods are methods that are like the methods of physics, which are mathematically controlled methods, or mathematically instituted methods.

I shall give you an example of the typical method that is currently dominant in empirical sociology: it is the survey method. The issue is to find out what is going on in a particular domain or in people’s heads; it is not perceptible, we know that what we perceive is false, we know because it is something superficial and it is a question precisely of revealing what is hidden – that is, the essence of what is happening in that domain. So using an indirect method, the scholar conducts a survey, in other words gets people to talk, not at all by asking them to respond to the question he is asking himself, but by asking them to answer questions that are not the questions the researcher asks himself, but indirect questions, that is questions which don’t appear to be related – and should not be related – to the question the researcher is asking himself, but questions so that the study of the answers given to these questions enables the scholar, the sociologist, to draw objective, scientific conclusions, thus independent of subjectivity – both the subjectivity of those he is questioning and of the person interpreting the answers. That is how these things are done. Meaning that we attempt to obtain subjective accounts from a series of individuals in order to discern, through scientific critique of subjective testimony, the objective reality that these people are living without being aware of it. In order to arrive at this scientific and objective result, we of course use a whole series of methods, the methods of which are essentially as follows: the first scientific point, the first scientific precaution, concerns the sampling of the people who are to be asked questions – in other words it is a matter of ensuring not only that the questions are pertinent, but also that the people to be questioned are fully representative of the group one wishes to study. So the whole problem is to have a decent sample, that is to approach a certain number of persons with the certainty that the whole, that the assembled responses obtained, will be properly representative of the opinion of the group one intends to study in this way. You understand that if you wish to know the opinion of butchers in the Paris region, you cannot allow yourself to survey butchers in Bordeaux or Marseilles, on the one hand, and even in the Paris region you cannot allow yourself to interview just any butcher. You know, the butcher in the 16th arrondissement and the butcher in the rue Mouffetard ⁶ are not the same. So it is a matter of finding out: to the extent that there is such a thing as the opinion of butchers in the Paris region, the issue is to find out which butchers you need to survey. Not merely such and such an individual, but such and such an individual as a weighted representative of the sociological reality of the world of butchers, and such that by questioning him, such and such an abstract individual, and such and such another, one has eventually questioned the corporate body of butchers, insofar as it exists, which is another issue. That is how it is done. And once one has gathered these results, in other words once one has gathered subjective testimonies which, when added together, can be considered to represent a pertinent objective meaning – at that point, one begins to work on the information. One begins to work on it, and that is where the use of mathematical methods comes in. Mathematical methods are used firstly to make the type sample, and secondly they are used to interpret the results obtained from the questions put to the individuals in the type sample. It is here, in a sense, that empirical sociology uses scientific methods, when it uses mathematical methods and poses a certain number of methodological problems that are significant in terms of theory.

The whole question is to know whether or not this corresponds to reality or not, to a reality – in some cases yes, in some cases no. Because, you understand, the question of knowing whether there is a general opinion among the corporate body of butchers in the Paris region may or may not correspond to a reality; in other words, there may indeed be a general opinion of the corporate body of butchers on a particular issue, but there may not be a collective opinion of the corporate body of butchers. If you seek an opinion where there cannot be one, you can’t call that scientific even if all your methods are. In other words, what is in question now, over and above all these methods themselves, is the pertinence of the question one is attempting to answer. In other words, when one draws up a questionnaire and questions a valid sample of people, applying mathematical methods to establish a valid sample of people to survey, on the one hand, and then applying mathematical methods to interpret the statistics on a valid, mathematical basis, the replies obtained from this sample, assumed to be objective, all of this presupposes that one has asked these people a question that makes sense – that is, that one has asked them a question that corresponds to an object that exists. Yet this is a fundamental historical experiment – and the first to theorize this observation was Kant – that we are afraid of asking questions about objects that do not exist. The sociologist who thinks he has the right to ask any question whatsoever, because he believes that the object exists, may well put a question about an object that does not exist. I mentioned Kant just now. In the history of human thought, Kant was the first man to produce a general theory not only of the possibility but of the existence of sciences that have no object. That is what the Critique of Pure Reason is. That is the theory of the possibility, and not only of the possibility, but even of the necessity, because it is a necessity, of the fundamental necessity of the existence of sciences that have no object. I apologize for citing Kant in relation to empirical sociology, but I believe that it is a fundamental theoretical problem. Kant demonstrated that it was not simply a historical accident for me – I don’t know if we would agree with him, but be that as it may, the fact of his demonstration was interesting – but through a fundamental need linked to human reason – this was his idea – that there could be, even that there must necessarily be, sciences without an object. In his time, these sciences were metaphysics, rational psychology and cosmology. And in a sense that is an experiment that we need to keep in mind, because it is extremely precious. Everything good and rational and valuable in Kant is built upon this. That is, on the observation that there were sciences without an object. That is, if we are to generalize, we can put the following question: it is that the whole application of a scientific method, particularly when it is presented in a rigorous, that is a mathematical way, mathematized, etc., can give rise to a whole development that appears scientific, but we are only dealing with a science if this entire development concerns an object that actually exists. That is all. If we are dealing with a development that appears scientific, actually scientific in the detail of the methodology, but which concerns an object that does not exist, then we need to wait for Kant to arrive and explain to us why we can and even must – it is inevitable – that we create sciences of non-existent objects. So I hope sociology will not need its own Kant to reform itself, but that, instructed by the lesson of 18th-century idealistic German philosophy, the great critical philosophy, it will itself pose the question, the following question: ‘I am creating a science, but is it possible that its object does not exist?’ I hope that sociology will reply either, or as the cases dictate, that in effect yes, it does exist, I am sure, I have determined scientifically, and in other cases no, it does not exist.

This introduces us to the second way of putting the problem of sociology. I was saying earlier – now I will talk about this very quickly – I was pointing out that one may ask oneself what constitutes a science, and compare the ideal definition of a science on which we can generally agree with the current state of sociology. That is, we can put the question, we may formulate the question in the following way: What is, for us today, a science? What does it consist of?

In very schematic terms, we can say that a science can be defined by the existence of three, let us say, three basic elements: a general theory which has a specific form depending on the level of development of the science, on the one hand, and on the other a method, a specific methodology that corresponds to that theory. That is, if you like, the subjective-objective side of science, it is there that it resides: physics today is the current theory of physics, on the one hand, and on the other it is the methods, the experiments of physics; it is also the theoretical working methods of theoretical physicists. As you know, there are experimental physicists and theoretical physicists. There is a third element that is in effect the truth of these two, which is that science is an object to itself. Yes, I said, an object to itself. What does that mean? That, in truth, is the crux of the matter. It is that science has an object such that, firstly, it is to itself, it is a form to itself, that is, it is to itself and not to others. There is no other discipline that disputes the claim of physics to its object, there is no other scientific discipline that disputes the claim of mathematics to its object: mathematics is comfortably in its place, no one comes to try and swipe its object, or the object of physics either. And psychology? Now psychology is really in trouble, its object is disowned by everyone, isn’t it, the object of psychology: neurologists tug on it from one side, physiologists from their side, medical practitioners from their side, sociologists, historians – everyone is pulling on it from their own side. The object of sociology is also quite contested. And what about literary history? It’s also quite often subject to that: it is put up for auction, there are several bidders. This poses other questions, but ultimately, we can state that what we consider as the scientific model is a scientific discipline that has an object to itself and that no one will come to steal or contest. Consequently, any scientific discipline which has an object that is a scientific object but is also an object of contestation – to use a fashionable term, contested – well, then you have to look on a case by case basis. It is not certain, it is suspect. In general, when people argue over an inheritance it is because the legal issue has not been settled. Some family quarrels about who is going to own the bit of field next door, it’s because things are not clear, there is something amiss. So a science must have a proper object.

It is also essential – and this is very important – that the relations that exist between the object of a science on the one hand, and the theory and methodology of that science on the other, are in adequate relationship to one another. In other words, there must be a correspondence between the theory and the method on the one hand, and the object on the other: that is to say that the object must not obviously extend beyond the theory and method, and the theory and method must not obviously extend beyond the object. This means that the theory must truly be the theory of the object in question and the method must truly be the method of the theory of the object in question applied to the object in question. In other words, there needs to be an organic, appropriate unity – obviously historically adequate, it may change – between theory, method and object. I shan’t go further here into the place of method in the relation between theory and object. I could do so, if you like, it is quite simple, to say that the method effectively reflects the relationship between theory and object in the theoretical practice of the science in question, that is, it is the enactment of the relationship. It is the active realization of the relationship that exists between theory and object, that is, the adequate relationship of fit between theory and object, in the actual practice of science. The method of a science is the aspect through which science works on its object to reveal the new truth, by consciously applying, in the form of a method, that is in the form of a technique of applying the relationships that exist between the theory and its object. That is something else.

So there we have what we might consider a definition of a science. Firstly, its own object, secondly a theory and a method that are genuinely the method for that object and not another, etc., that is adequate to it, and adequate in such a way as not to pose a serious theoretical problem. If we compare this idea of a science to the current state of sociology, it is clear that we can see there is no adequacy, in short that there are masses of problems: it doesn’t work. What I said earlier about method, we find it here reversed. It is not enough to deal with a good method, etc., but the good method used particularly in tests, questionnaires, etc., must correspond both to the theory and to the object. It must be adequate. This is not always the case with sociology, because in general sociologists who use survey methods do not ask themselves whether their object exists, can you imagine! And then they also do not ask themselves whether it is in fact their object and not perhaps another’s object. Since the psychologist considers that it is his object, he might get it wrong. If it would happen that psychology as such would not exist, I mean as a science, might not exist, if by chance psychology could not exist as a science, you’re talking about a series of misinterpretations that are being applied in the fact that every psychologist believes that the object he is dealing with – including in the scientific disciplines of psychology, for example experimental psychology – firstly, is an object that exists, and secondly is an object that belongs to psychology. Do you see the historical misunderstanding here?

So that is broadly how we may pose the problem of current sociology in its relationship with the Human Sciences in general, it being understood that the Human Sciences occupy a particular position within the history of human culture, because they have to cover the position that in the past was occupied by the Humanities or by Letters.

So now Passeron on the left, ⁷ and then Bourdieu. They are former students of the École, they are philosophers. Does one have to be a philosopher to be a sociologist? It is not essential. Is being a philosopher detrimental to sociology? I think experience shows us that it is not – but can it have disadvantages? Possibly. Anyway, they will talk about that, they will tell you their story later on. But they are not only philosophers. They are philosophers because there is a teaching certificate in philosophy, and you have to earn a living. So it is clear that work for an intellectual – unless you are a genius and earn your living through a contract with Julliard publishers –you have to work somewhere, and therefore take the teaching certificate, then get by in secondary education where you teach a whole series of stories to overcrowded classes, and manage to get out of it and one day become a research assistant, etc. All that happened through the events called the Algerian war, since Bourdieu found himself in Algeria for two years, where he did something different from low-rank soldiering, because he managed to do some ethnology. How did he end up doing that? That’s his story, he will explain. So the fact is that here are, in a sense, two characters who represent a sort of concrete synthesis of everything I have told you. They are philosophers, so of course they have read Gurvitch, meaning they have in their minds sociology as an absolute general theory. If I say that, it’s not to say that they have only read Gurvitch: Gurvitch is an allegorical example. It’s a type individual, you know. Gurvitch is like the sun for Aristotle, an individual who is a species all by himself.

On the other hand, this one, on my left here, with the curly hair, the shorter one, he did ethnology, real ethnology, for a year and a half in Algeria. In other words, he knows what sociology in its second form is. He has written books about it. He will explain that. Passeron – no, Passeron didn’t do ethnology. He will not claim otherwise, he will not argue – he has not done ethnology. No, but now they’ve been working for a year and a half and they do empirical sociology. So you see the landscape: he took into account three things: abstract sociology, sociology, ethnology, and then empirical sociology. He [Passeron], he gave ethnology a miss – it’s obviously a major handicap and you will see straight away, he is much less strong than the other one. The fact is that that sometimes gives him certain advantages, because, being closer to his philosophical training, it almost gives him advantages rather than his personal relationships with concepts, which are not mixed up with one and a half years spent among the Berbers. Because, you will appreciate, when one is living with the Berbers, the concept can sometimes get lost, and it’s hard work to get it back again, especially when this is taking place during the Algerian war.

So there we are, you asked us for characters who represent the concrete synthesis. They are cultural objects – I apologize [laughs] – but they are cultural objects. And it is as such that they are going to talk to you about their sociology, by explaining what they are currently doing. Because what they do, is in some sense, through their intellectual autobiography, is somehow revealing the reality of contemporary sociology and its problems. Because they have been through all of that and when they started to do empirical sociology, well, they started to apply existing methods, in other words they did what everyone does, what everyone says you should do – that is, you must have a good sample, a good questionnaire, you gather everything together properly, you work on it, mathematize it, and there you go! They realized something: that is they asked a question one day, they got fantastic responses, but they realized something, which was that the responses they got corresponded to an object that did not exist. So that’s a bit of a headache, that, when you’ve just got responses – really, truly authentic, really scientifically authenticated, there’s no problem, everything is absolutely respectable – er, except of course that it relates to an object that doesn’t exist. I don’t want to praise the conditions of some, if one could, if one conducted a sociological study, for example, to know whether the Virgin Mary was a virgin when Christ was born, one would of course get an answer.

Well anyway, so they will talk about a problem which is the same problem I’ve been talking about. In other words, their work would be conducted on the actual conditions of their work. And then what will put you at your ease straight away is that the actual conditions of their work are also the conditions of your work. In other words their work will be conducted on the conditions of their work which are the conditions of your own work because that is what they work on. They are currently writing a book which will address very precisely this question: what are the current fundamental forms of dissemination of culture? And they came scientifically – well, scientifically, eh, ou la la la – but well, scientifically to this conclusion: that the fundamental form of diffusion of culture in contemporary society is not the mass media – in other words, radio, television and all the rest: it is school. You will say that they didn’t have to bother looking very far, but you have to believe that they needed to look for it very far indeed because everything that prevails in contemporary sociology is not at all of this view. So that is how they came to this conclusion and that’s why they work on education: that is, they study both what they do and then what you do. And that’s what we are going to work on. That’s what they’re going to work on this year in a scientific way, meaning using existing scientific methods, obviously from time to time asking of these methods: Do you have the right to be used? But, well, that’s just because they like to disrupt things and they don’t think there automatically exists a street at the end of a street, they think the experience anyone can have just by walking in some districts of Paris – they think that there are sometimes dead ends.

Transcribed and edited by Charlotte Branchu and Derek Robbins

Translated from the French by Rachel Gomme