Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World

Cultural studies: Crossing borders, defending distinctions

“…The two are not in opposition to each other: in fact, intellectuals can intervene in political struggles in the most efficient manner when this engagement is founded on the basic rules and experiences of their own relatively autonomous field practice. Bourdieu (1991: 661–9) called for a critical reflexivity to enable intellectuals to neither monopolize nor abandon their specific privileges, but to understand that reason is ‘a product of history that has to be incessantly re-produced through historical action aimed at guaranteeing the social conditions for the possibility of rational thinking’, and that they should therefore also ‘struggle for the universalization of the privileged conditions of existence which make the pursuit of the universal possible’. It is precisely on the basis of the specific procedures of their own fields that scholars and intellectuals in general can make a difference in society.…”

Bourdieu’s Five Lessons for Criminology

“…On Bourdieu's view, scholars have a duty to act as intellectuals, that is, to engage in 'political actions' outside the semi-autonomous field of academic production (Bourdieu 1991). This duty arises out of the fact that scholars possess specialized training and knowledge; they possess leisure-the word 'scholar', as Bourdieu repeatedly points out (e.g.…”

StandReconstructed: Contingent Closure and Institutional Change

“…Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language, does not pose the semantic difficulty English translators deal with when it comes to rendering an equivalent to the German term Stand (although linguistically, English is of course much closer to its fellow-Indo-European German than to Hungarian). The Hungarian equivalent concept, 12 See, e.g., Bourdieu (1985Bourdieu ( , 1986Bourdieu ( , 1991, Wacquant (1992Wacquant ( , 1993aWacquant ( , 1993b, Lamont and Lareau (1988), Joppke (1986), Böröcz and Southworth (1996). 13 I owe special thanks to Hungarian social historian Attila Melegh for reminding me of the significance of such notions from Hungarian social history, faintly translating into English as the distinction between the "firmlyrooted" and the "comer-and-goer" ("tősgyökeres" vs. "gyüttment").…”

“…and western Europe but also North America. A large literature on labor and management practices, migration, and economic action overall 50 suggests the unerasable, prominent presence of relational features by emphasizing the significance of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust coalescing in "social capital" (for theoretical summaries, see, e.g., Bourdieu 1986;Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993), not to mention the related literatures on corporate elites (e.g., Useem 1980) and political patronage (e.g., Blok 1969) in the richest, most "advanced" societies of the world. The existence of the large and respected field of social network analysis of "Western" societies testifies that the relational logic is hardly an odd, exotic "oriental" or "peasant" feature of the societies of the European margin.…”