Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu is not known as an urban sociologist. His contributions are usually seen in the sociology of culture, practice theory, stratification, and the sociology of intellectuals. 1 Indeed, Bourdieu seldom mentions the city and urbanization in his work. He does not figure as a key reference in urban studies. Yet, urbanization in its many forms is a central feature of modern life; it not only encompasses most contemporary populations but its effects reach deep into most isolated rural areas. And cities are clear centers of economic, political, and cultural power in the modern world. But Bourdieu did not construct the city itself as an object for sociological research. Notwithstanding these observations, Wacquant (2023) in Bourdieu in the City sets out to rectify that. Wacquant argues that the city and urbanization are very much an implicit theme in much of Bourdieu’s work.
One objective of this book is exegetical; namely, to scour Bourdieu’s massive oeuvre for every possible mention of themes that would make Bourdieu relevant to contemporary urban studies. From Bourdieu’s early work in colonial Algeria, to his home rural community in southwestern France, to housing policy and social suffering and marginality in contemporary France, Wacquant sets about to “extract from Bourdieu a robust conception of the urban.” He wants to uncover the “tacit urbanism” in Bourdieu’s sociology. He wants “to change the way the readers understand Bourdieu and view the metropolis.” This exercise will interest Bourdieusian scholars who have not seen this “lost urban sociology” in Bourdieu’s work. That one can find embryos of the modern metropolis in French military settlement camps during the Algerian war or in ethnographic observations of a small-town country ball in southwestern France, strikes this reviewer as a bit of a stretch. But under the broad themes of how mental and social structures correlate with spatial divisions under state power, Wacquant makes the connections.
Another objective is much grander. With conceptual tools elaborated from Bourdieu, Wacquant hopes to change the way urban studies are now done. He wants to shift the focus of an entire substantive area of investigation. The book is written for “practitioners of urban studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into urbanization, urbanism and inequality in the city.” And more generally, it is to encourage social scientists and humanists to probe more in depth their understanding of Bourdieu’s sociology and deploy it their own areas of study.
Modeling Bourdieu
To these ends, Wacquant extracts from Bourdieu’s work a formal model for sociological analysis that can be applied not only to urban life but to any social situation worthy of sociological analysis. This is something that Bourdieu himself did not do, at least in any comprehensive fashion. Indeed, he resisted offering a generalized formal framework with universal application. This would be too “theoreticist” for Bourdieu, perhaps echoing his criticism of Talcott Parsons who he accused, as did C. Wright Mills, of “abstract theoreticism.” Bourdieu presented himself as a researcher, always maintaining that his conceptual tools were carved out of actual empirical research and scientific questions he was asking of the social world. He was quite dismissive of abstract theorizing.
This is not to say that formalizable statements cannot be found here and there in Bourdieu’s texts. Bourdieu gives us many leads; I think particularly of his widely acknowledged map in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) of French social classes and lifestyle tastes. This diagram of social space is replicated with variations in later texts. And prior to Bourdieu’s untimely death in 2002, he was working on a generalized theory of fields.
In this book, Wacquant refers to his “neobourdieusian framework” and rightly so. Here he proposes a formalized “trialectic” model of symbolic, social, and physical space that is guided by typological reasoning and constructed with four “transversal” methodological principles in mind. It is more formalized and comprehensive than what one will find in Bourdieu himself. It is, however, a formalization that emerged gradually out of Wacquant’s own empirical work on urban inequality and marginality. He did not sit down one day and extract the formal model from Bourdieu and then follow it faithfully in his subsequent empirical investigations. The model was constructed gradually from his own research and from his extensive and probing familiarity with Bourdieu’s massive oeuvre. But full formalization comes later as he reflects back on the various conceptual moves he makes across three books. This is a retrospective and reworked formulation of that framework that guided his work in Urban Outcasts (Wacquant, 2008), Punishing the Poor (Wacquant, 2009b), and Deadly Symbiosis (Wacquant, 2009a), which he now calls his “trilogy.” Bourdieu in the City consists of three chapters plus a prologue and epilogue. Each chapter distills in condensed summary the key conceptual terms and principle empirical claims of the trilogy with some response to critics from discussions of his work. These three books are major contributions in urban sociology and have been widely discussed and enhances our understanding of inequality in the modern metropolis.
But it was not just empirical research that that led to formalization. The book reports on several conferences and subsequent publications centered around his work on urban inequality and marginality that obliged Wacquant to clarify and elaborate his formal model. The three chapters each conclude with brief reflections from conferences and publications that centered around themes from the three books and include responses by Wacquant to some of his critics. So, the formalization is in large part due to Wacquant trying to distinguish his thinking in a competitive intellectual field. The formalization exudes intellectual field effects.
Those who have followed Wacquant’s work closely will find few surprises here. Virtually everything has been said before. But the volume provides in condensed form his central arguments. It is a dense conceptual text that will appeal only to those willing to slog through the formalization. But it does help clarify and condense his thinking in a single publication.
Wacquant’s “Trialectic” model
Wacquant’s formalized approach for urban studies and beyond comes in two parts. On the one hand, it proposes a topological model that identifies three principal spaces: symbolic, social, and physical—what Wacquant calls the “trialectic” of symbolic, social, and physical space. It is built on Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic power (the “epicenter” of Bourdieusian sociology), social space (the “mother” category of Bourdieu’s analysis of social differentiation), and physical space (the built environment that both Bourdieu and Wacquant consider is in effect social space embedded in the physical environment). In Wacquant’s words: “The trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment).” This model proposes a multidimensional research program that would hold together these three dimensions of social life for any comprehensive research project on the city, or indeed on any object of sociological investigation.
On the other hand, Wacquant formulates four transversal principles that yield six distinctive features of his “neo-Bourdieusian framework” for the study of urban inequality and marginality and any sociological investigation more generally. First, following the historical epistemology of Bachelard (1984), the researcher must break with folk and received views of social life to construct rigorous scientific concepts. Wacquant considers that “ghetto” has become a folk category and proposes in its place “hyperghetto” to designate recently developed stigmatized urban zones of extreme poverty, insecurity, desolation, and entrapment. Second, one should map the views of agents relative to the positions (the kinds of capitals they hold) they occupy in social space. Third, drawing from Cassirer’s (1953, 1944) emphasis on the efficacy of symbolic structures, one should stress the classifying power of the state as a bureaucratic field in which government actors and agencies at all levels categorize and differentiate the population. Fourth, following Wilhelm Leibniz (De Risi, 2007; Weik, 2010) and Durkheim (1966, 2012), think typologically by constructing the social space, the symbolic space, and the physical space, and identify the mutual correspondences, transpositions, and distortions between the three. Fifth, drawing on the historicity counseled by Weber (1978), stress that the contours of the three spaces and their interrelations are products of historical struggles rather than fixed in time. And sixth, study the dispositions of actors, their habitus, and show how they are connected to the structures of social space and their positions within it.
The power triangle
Wacquant invites us to imagine his conceptual framework (his trialectic) in geometric imagery. One is to think typologically of society in terms of three basic dimensions: symbolic, social, and physical. The three are conceptually distinct planes with their own particular structures and dynamics that intersect in various ways depending on the empirical object of study. They are organized hierarchically, however: symbolic at the top, then social, and finally physical. On the three planes Wacquant projects the key concepts from Bourdieu that animate his work: symbolic power that is embodied by the modern state as a bureaucratic field, social space that is the city, and habitus with its dispositions reflecting the determining flow of the above two.
This conceptual framework is presented in triangular imagery to illustrate its hierarchical order. At the apex is symbolic power exercised by the state as a bureaucratic field. Following Bourdieu, the state is bifurcated by the left hand of agencies and policies relative to welfare and education provision (the left side of the triangle) and the right hand representing capital and the punitive or disciplinary pole (the right side of the triangle). Social space fills the area of the triangle that becomes the city. At the base of the triangle is habitus that is situated between the two corners, class (market) to the left and race (ethnicity) to the right.
Wacquant then projects his trilogy and its key concepts onto the triangular image. “Punishing the “Poor” (2009) with the key concept of “workfare” is situated at the left hand of the state. Deadly Symbiosis (2009a) with the key concept of “prisonfare” is situated on the right hand of the state. And “Urban Outcasts” (2008)—as well as Body and Soul (Wacquant, 2021)—at the base. The social space of the city includes the hyperghetto.
At the base of the triangle, habitus reflects the dynamics of class and race and the determining symbolic power of the state. Race and state and class and state have reciprocating influences represented by the two sides of the triangle. However, the message Wacquant wants to drive home is the central role of the state as a bureaucratic field that monopolizes symbolic power and is therefore ultimately the key factor shaping class and racial conditions, delineating and segregating neighborhoods, and shaping the habitus of actors in the metropolis.
The triangular imagery, as Wacquant readily admits, is for conceptual clarification that simplifies considerably and can only approximate the “entangled and muddled” social worlds we live in. Moreover, as a map of conceptual relations he admits that historical analysis needs to be added. Chief among historical developments in urban life have been deindustrialization under state policies of neoliberalism, the consequential decline of traditional working-class neighborhoods, the decline of the traditional ghetto and the emergence of the new hyperghetto, and the rise of territorial stigmatization. Nonetheless, this is a top-down model that starts with the field of power and the state that organize social space and physical space at the base. Wacquant emphasizes the capacity of state institutions—at their macro, meso, and micro levels—to structure the way we think about social space, particularly the disenfranchised urban areas and the way we organize social space and the built environment.
A model for reorienting urban studies
With this model, Wacquant has an ambitious goal: nothing short of reorienting urban studies, particularly in the United States. He wants to “move beyond the stateless sociology of the city” that he finds too characteristic of much American urbanism. He would start with the state rather than the street or neighborhood. State agencies, actors, and policies—at all levels of government (federal, state, local) shape the street and the neighborhood.
Wacquant is particularly keen on stressing that state action is not just in response to the social problems that impoverished neighborhoods present but that it is the driver of those problems in the first place. He would bring the state into urban studies that he criticizes as being largely “stateless” investigations of neighborhood problems of poverty, crime, and marginality for too long. Government agencies, actors, and policies do not just respond to urban problems like poverty and blighted neighborhoods; they are the root causes of urban problems. In particular, he stresses state polices of deregulation creating job loss in enhancing the process of deindustrialization and the simultaneous withdrawal of welfare provision reducing the safety net for the effects of job loss through deindustrialization. It is the heavy hands of the state that have created the problematic urban environment in the first place.
One key state institution that Wacquant would bring front and center to better understand the dynamics and structure of urban poverty is the penal system. Wacquant would bring the penal system as an urban institution to the center of urban studies of inequality. The part of the state that has been left out of most urban studies is the whole criminal justice system that plays a central role in impoverished neighborhoods since it touches so many, particularly men, in the hyperghetto. Not only prisons but also jails, courts, probation officers, and all the agencies and personnel related to the criminal justice system. This is one of the most important contributions of Wacquant to urban studies; namely, to consider the jail as a “quintessentially urban institution” not to be relegated to criminology as a specialized topic but brought into urban studies to understand the political origins and containment of precarity in the modern metropolis. This sets Wacquant’s urban sociology apart from those studies focused on just neighborhood, racial/ethnic composition, and gang life. Wacquant stresses how the penal system centrally connects to all of these and is centrally driven by the macro state policies of neoliberal deregulation and retreat from welfare provision.
A “key argument” Wacquant wishes to advocate for is a multidisciplinary approach in urban studies that would link the triad of marginality, ethnicity, and penalty. He sees existing urban studies too segmented by those who focus on “class fragmentation,” or those who focus on “ethnic division,” or those who focus on criminal justice issues with little cross over. Wacquant would bring these studies into creative dialogue, or more precisely in this trialectic study design that would include all three components demonstrating their mutual interactions.
Despite Wacquant’s concern with impoverished urban areas, Simes et al. (2023) conclude from their extensive review of the literature on spatial-contextual patterns of criminal justice contact that there has been a “overemphasis on large cities” in discussion of the criminal legal system. There is growing incarceration across rural as well as urban areas since the 1990s and poverty increasingly moved to the suburbs. Those recent trends do not fit well into Wacquant’s model. Further, Wacquant admits that his view of the state power model is based on the Western state experience but argues that it can be flexibly exported to the Global South. Others are not so sure (Loveman, 2014). Hilgers (2012), for example, finds striking exceptions in many African countries where one has a paradox of “a state that is both omnipresent and completely absent”; namely, that the welfare function is largely absent.
Universal application
Beyond this ambitious plan to redirect urban studies, Wacquant proposes his trialectic model for researching sociologically any social setting. There is a universalizing objective here. The theoretical framework is presented not only as a guide for the study of the city because of the central place in modern societies, including the Global South, but as a guiding framework for all sociological investigation regardless of social setting. While acknowledging that all situations are different requiring flexible application of his framework, it nonetheless is designed not only for cities, large or small, north, or south, but presumably for all objects of sociological analysis regardless of the degree of urbanization present.
Identifying who are the intellectual enemies helps highlight distinctive features of a work. At one point Wacquant identifies them as “positivism, realism, and hermeneutics” without further comment. Occasionally he takes a swipe at structuralist Marxism for its materialist reductionism that cannot account for the stigmatizing power of state imposed penal sanctions. He criticizes the Chicago school of ecology for restricting its search for neighborhood effects of poverty by not connecting them to their source in the field struggles of the state. And Foucault (1977) is referenced frequently because Wacquant is keen on distinguishing his expansive view of state power from Foucault’s “disciplinary society” and its “diffused power” of governmentality. But his overwhelming criticism is directed at the many American urbanists who neglect to put the symbolic power of the state front and center in their writings on urban poverty and marginality. These include the “Chicago-style ecology and ethnography, political economy, postcolonial urbanism, assemblage theory, planetary urbanism, and the urban land nexus approach.”
Beyond Bourdieu
Wacquant calls his project “neo-Bourdieusian.” Where does he go beyond Bourdieu? What is “neo” here? First, there is an explicit focus on the metropolis that one does not find in Bourdieu’s work. Wacquant makes the case that there is an “implicit” urbanism in some of Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu does theorize the rise of the modern state but not the city. Wacquant thinks that one could easily substitute “city” for “state” in some of Bourdieu’s texts. Wacquant observes similar dynamics in both. Wacquant offers a more explicit analysis of the neoliberal city; indeed, he makes the city the prime expression of neoliberalism.
Second, Wacquant gives more specification to neoliberalism and the state. It is not just free market ideology and state policies originating from the United States as the prime carrier. His view of the state is not only one bifurcated between the left hand (social safety net and education) and the right hand (capital and punishment) but one that is liberal at the top and punitive at the bottom.
Third, Wacquant contends that had Bourdieu focused on the metropolis he would have enriched his analysis of the great variety of material and symbolic conditions (capitals) leading to the multiplicity of fields.
Fourth, Wacquant would offer a more diversified and complex sense of habitus than the one Bourdieu presented. One central claim by Wacquant is that had Bourdieu made the modern metropolis the explicit object of research, had he constructed the city as an object of research, he might have modified some of his claims relative to habitus explicitly because of the urban environment. The urban environment fosters more diversity of habitus and more incongruity within habitus than Bourdieu saw. In his later work, Bourdieu attributed the decoupling of aspirations and objective chances to triumphant neoliberalism. Wacquant observers this was really “life in the metropolis” not just life under neoliberalism.
Changes in Wacquant’s views
Has Wacquant changed his mind in any of this? He backs away from his earlier argument made in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) that one needs to employ the ensemble of Bourdieu’s key concepts: habitus, capital, social space, field, symbolic power, doxa, and epistemic reflexivity. He had argued that all of Bourdieu’s concepts were interrelated and that researchers needed to employ the full package for effective use of Bourdieusian thinking. One needed to adopt the whole enchilada. He now appears more willing to present Bourdieu’s concepts as a toolkit (terminology made popular by Ann Swidler) to pick and choose particular concepts or arguments most relevant to the particular research object at hand. He now recommends that researchers draw selectively from Bourdieu’s concept to make them work effectively for the empirical data at hand. He acknowledges this shift in view and justifies it by arguing that the intellectual field has changed, that knowledge of Bourdieu is now widely understood whereas in the earlier period it was important to present the ensemble of Bourdieu’s thinking to intellectual fields where he was little understood or misunderstood.
Yet there is a tension where in another place Wacquant responds to a critic by saying that they need “to encompass a broader range of Bourdieu’s writing, if not the full spectrum of his major inquiries, when calling on him for analytic guidance.” More explicitly, Wacquant warns against drawing on just one or two of Bourdieu’s concepts. Rather, one should employ Wacquant’s own trialectic. So, in spite of the claim to the contrary, Wacquant is very much advocating for an integral application of Bourdieusian inspired thinking to urban studies and beyond.
Wacquant also acknowledges that gender is one missing dimension from his own work as well as in urban studies more generally.
Until recently, discussion and research on unemployment, crime, and incarceration have been largely dominated by men. Women and children should receive more attention in studies of urban marginality.
The state
Finally, given the central place that Wacquant gives to the state in his trialectic model, a concluding critical reflection on this seems in order. Departing from Weber’s (1978) classic definition of the state as that set of institutions that monopolize the means of physical violence, Wacquant, like Bourdieu before him, stresses that the state also monopolizes the means of symbolic violence over a given territory. Wacquant proposes a state-centric model of symbolic power as his triangular diagrams make clear. This is conceptually useful for it directs attention to the manifold ways that official classifications group and differentiate, privilege some, disenfranchise many, through legal administrative categorization.
In spite of a top-down state-centric model, both Bourdieu and Wacquant reject the model of a monolithic state as a unitary actor. They substitute the idea of the bureaucratic field, conceptualizing the state not as a unitary force but as that vast array of individuals, agencies, and policies ranging across macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis that try to monopolize the means of symbolic violence. The dynamics of a bureaucratic field displace an instrumentalist view of state action. Still, the logic of state action is omnipresent. One looks in vain for the nooks and crannies of urban social life where the state might not be present. Wacquant may dispute the diffused power thinking of Foucault, by following Bourdieu to stress that there are concentrations of state power in agencies, people, and policies that Foucault underplays. Still, the hands the state are at every street corner and alley way. The agency of the state seems overstated.
These monopolizing efforts are far from as comprehensive or extensive as Wacquant would have us believe. In spite of its strength, the American state has been chronically unable to corral the interests of private money and power from influencing substantially the politics of public power. Wacquant’s top-down view of the state would minimize that complex interplay of private and public interest. Moreover, there is a long history in the United States of anti-statist resistance to centralized authority. Wacquant’s model seems to downplay American political culture where from the very beginning of the country there has been a skepticism toward centralized state power. The Federalist papers are but one illustration. And in the current populist climate that resistance is alive and well. The Tea Party movement illustrates the limited monopolizing power of the American state (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012). Moreover, falling outside of this top down model is the media, the extensive culture industry and its elites, religion, foundations, the nonprofit sector, and popular culture. While they may profit from state policies of deregulation, their market power hardly reduces to that of state incentives.
At one point Wacquant seems to back away from the claim that the state actually monopolizes symbolic power when he writes:
“Whether the state monopolies the capacity to draw and guard geographical and social boundaries in the city is an open question that points to the need for a historical sociology of the bureaucratic field and of the field of power and their imprinting on the ground in the society under study.” Yet Wacquant remains within his model. The historical sociology he calls for is of the state, nothing else. It does not recognize significant factors outside of the model or that cannot be easily assimilated or absorbed into the logic of the model. However, the exercise of symbolic power needs to include the media, culture industries, religion, and popular culture. Wacquant seems reluctant to recognize how these can harness market power that stand outside of or oblige the state to respond. Take just two illustrations. Fox News can hardly be considered an agency of state authority. And the American state certainly does not monopolize the means of violence; the NRA enjoys considerable autonomy from state control much to the anger of many of those speaking out against gun violence.
A criticism of Bourdieu’s view of the state is that it neglects the importance of physical violence, something that Weber did not do. Wacquant provides a useful corrective to this by stressing the role of the penal system as a central arm of the state in controlling disadvantaged and stigmatized urban populations. But in my view such an expansive view of the state does not go quite far enough. Not just policing but the military priorities of the American state also play a role in urban disadvantaged neighborhoods as well as in those beyond the city. The tremendous size of the military budget drains resources from social welfare needs. Moreover, poorer neighborhoods disproportionally provide the cannon fodder for wars abroad as was particularly the case in Vietnam.
Challenges
Wacquant gives us a challenging formal model for redirecting urban studies and sociological investigations more generally. It holds promising possibilities but also exudes limits. The state-centric model, albeit one of a bureaucratic field of struggle, is perhaps just a starting point, an ideal type, with empirical investigation showing just how far state monopolization of symbolic and physical violence actually goes. As an ideal type, however, one should not confuse the reality of the model for empirical reality.
Wacquant admits that he “overplays” his claim for the central role of state power in structuring urban poverty and marginality. But in his effort to “twist the stick in another direction,” to lecture American urbanists on their stateless urban studies, Wacquant seems reluctant to acknowledge the limits to the monopolizing force of the state either empirically or conceptually. As a corrective to American “stateless” accounts of urban poverty and marginality, he is not wrong. However, as a generalized model the framework seems without limits. There appears to be nothing beyond the model that would count as significant symbolic power to order the way people live. Wacquant seems reluctant to talk about a source of significant symbolic power beyond state boundaries.
From a sociology of knowledge perspective his formalized trialectic model is itself a historical construction reflecting positioning within the intellectual field as well as empirical realities of contemporary urbanization in the advanced countries. Here Bachelard bites back. When a conceptual model becomes all encompassing, when it attempts a totalizing account of social realities, then there is danger of slippage from a model of reality to the reality of the model as Bourdieu would critically put it. It assumes a kind of taken-for-granted conceptual status that itself calls for an epistemological break. I think Bourdieu in his better moments would acknowledge that. Bachelard certainly would have. If and when his conceptual thinking becomes formalized into a model of universal import, then Bourdieu might well join Marx in proclaiming “I am not a Bourdieusian”! Wacquant seems to recognize this, or at least gives it lip service, when at the end of the Prologue he quotes from Weber’s (1970) classic statement in “Science as Vocation” that “Every scientific ‘fullfilment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated.”
Wacquant has given us a formal model that he constructed during and retrospectively from his own remarkable research on urban poverty and advanced marginality. It is a demanding and extensive theoretical agenda for research. For him, it holds things together and charts a challenging direction for reorienting urban studies and all sociological research. But for others, will it be enabling, or an exhausting option, better set aside for another day?
