Outline of a Theory of Practice

The best thing about this book is the blurb from the Times Higher Ed Supplement:

"OTP can be highly recommended as a complex and often beautifully written piece of philosophical literature."

*BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN*??? What the heck were they reading before this, Hegel translated into Linear B????

Execrable prose style aside, this is well worth reading, particularly if you can resist the temptation to read it all. If you're an anthropologist, no doubt his musings on the Kabyla ritual year calendar and so on could be of interest. If you're a historian of philosophy, his complaints about Sartre might be worth a look. But the real meat is the three short theoretical chapters: 'The Objective Limits of Objectivism,' argues that a purely show more objective social science (which looks at the world from a third person perspective) will never capture the importance of social rituals. It also handily dispatches structuralist and phenomenological approaches to social science as hopelessly one-sided. 'Structures and the Habitus' outlines the concept of the latter: it mediates between objective structures and practices, and can be seen in the similarities of different spheres of life. 'Structures, Habitus, Power' introduces us to the idea of 'doxa' (the realm of the thinkable), symbolic capital (convertable into economic capital and therefore not purely 'cultural') and tries to put all of the above into a political perspective.

The big problem is with that last little bit; Bourdieu's 'political' perspective is one that assumes, without further ado, that *only* 'heterodoxy' or heresy can produce new ideas; that both doxa and orthodoxy are by definition bad; and that everything is, in the last instance, the product of material interests and nothing else. Aside from being '68-simplistic, this is also numbingly depressing. It's just possible that the world we live in has some good things about it, and that those things aren't just material interests. And if that's not possible, it's not clear to me why you'd give a tish about politics at all. show less

I keep going back to this book because it takes the Wittgensteinian line of representing philosophy as an intellectual error - but the catch is, as Aristotle observed, even those who attack philosophy are doing philosophy!

Almost comically obtuse at time (in the great French postmodern tradition!) but this work does a good job introducing some key concepts in social anthropology such as "doxa."