What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

Table of Contents:
YEAR 1989–1990 Lecture of 18 January 1990 An unthinkable object The state as a neutral site The Marxist tradition The calendar and the structure of temporality State categories Acts of state The private-home market and the state The Barre commission on housing Notes Lecture of 25 January 1990 The theoretical and the empirical State commissions and stagings The social construction of public problems The state as viewpoint on viewpoints Official marriage Theory and theory effects The two meanings of the word ‘state’ Transforming the particular into the universal The obsequium Institutions as ‘organized fiduciary’ Genesis of the state. Difficulties of the undertaking Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology The state and the sociologist Notes Lecture of 1 February 1990 The rhetoric of the official The public and the official The universal other and censorship The ‘legislator as artist’ The genesis of public discourse Public discourse and the imposition of form Public opinion Notes Lecture of 8 February 1990 The concentration of symbolic resources Sociological reading of Franz Kafka An untenable research programme History and sociology Shmuel Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires Perry Anderson’s two books The problem of the three routes according to Barrington Moore Notes Lecture of 15 February 1990 The official and the private Sociology and history: genetic structuralism Genetic history of the state Game and field Anachronism and the illusion of the nominal The two faces of the state Notes YEAR 1990–1991 Lecture of 10 January 1991 Historical approach and genetic approach Research strategy Housing policy Interactions and structural relations Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization The effect of ‘that’s the way it is …’ and the closing of possibilities The space of possibilities The example of spelling Notes Lecture of 17 January 1991 Reminder of the course’s approach The two meanings of the word ‘state’: state as administration, state as territory The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly Notes Lecture of 24 January 1991 Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms Notes Lecture of 31 January 1991 Reply to questions Cultural archaisms and economic transformations Culture and national unity: the case of Japan Bureaucracy and cultural integration National unification and cultural domination Notes Lecture of 7 February 1991 Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning The state as producer of principles of classification Belief effect and cognitive structures The coherence effect of state symbolic systems The school timetable as a state construction The producers of doxa Notes Lecture of 14 February 1991 Sociology, an esoteric science with an exoteric air Professionals and lay people The state structures the social order Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy Transmutation of private into public: the appearance of the modern state in Europe Notes Lecture of 21 February 1991 Logic of the genesis and emergence of the state: symbolic capital The stages of the process of concentration of capital The dynastic state The state as a power over powers Concentration and dispossession of species of capital: the example of physical force capital Constitution of a central economic capital and construction of an autonomous economic space Notes Lecture of 7 March 1991 Reply to questions: conformity and consensus Concentration processes of the species of capital: resistances The unification of the juridical market The constitution of an interest in the universal The state viewpoint and totalization: informational capital Concentration of cultural capital and national construction ‘Natural nobility’ and state nobility Lecture of 14 March 1991 Digression: an overthrow in the intellectual field The double face of the state: domination and integration Jus loci and jus sanguinis Unification of the market in symbolic goods Analogy between the religious field and the cultural field Notes YEAR 1991–1992 Lecture of 3 October 1991 A model of the transformations of the dynastic state The notion of reproduction strategies The notion of a system of reproduction strategies The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies The ‘king’s house’ Juridical logic and practical logic of the dynastic state Objectives of the next lecture Notes Lecture of 10 October 1991 The ‘house’ model against historical finalism The stakes in historical research on the state The contradictions of the dynastic state A tripartite structure Notes Lecture of 24 October 1991 Recapitulation of the logic of the course Family reproduction and state reproduction Digression on the history of political thought The historical role of jurists in the process of state construction Differentiation of power and structural corruption: an economic model Notes Lecture of 7 November 1991 Preamble: the pitfalls of communication in social science The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 1: the ambiguous power of sub-bureaucrats The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 2: the ‘pure’ The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 3: double game and double ‘I’ The genesis of the bureaucratic space and the invention of the public Notes Lecture of 14 November 1991 Construction of the republic and construction of the nation The constitution of the public in the light of an English treatise on constitutional law The use of royal seals: the chain of warrants Notes Lecture of 21 November 1991 Reply to a question on the public/private contrast The transmutation of private into public: a non-linear process The genesis of the meta-field of power: differentiation and dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic authorities A research programme on the French Revolution Dynastic principle versus juridical principle as seen through the lit de justice Methodological digression: the kitchen of political theories Juridical struggles as symbolic struggles for power The three contradictions of jurists Notes Lecture of 28 November 1991 History as a stake in struggles The juridical field: a historical approach Functions and functionaries The state as fictio juris Juridical capital as linguistic capital and mastery of practice Jurists face the church: a corporation acquires autonomy Reformation, Jansenism and juridism The public: a reality without precedent that keeps coming into being Notes Lecture of 5 December 1991 Programme for a social history of political ideas and the state Interest in disinterestedness Jurists and the universal The (false) problem of the French Revolution The state and the nation The state as ‘civil religion’ Nationality and citizenship: contrast between the French and German models Struggles between interests and struggles between unconscious forms in political debate Notes Lecture of 12 December 1991 The construction of political space: the parliamentary game Digression: television in the new political game From the paper state to the real state Domesticating the dominated: the dialectic of discipline and philanthropy The theoretical dimension of state construction Questions for a conclusion Notes APPENDICES Notes Bibliography Index