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“Populism” and the idea of morally superior elites
Is populism a good concept? Or is it a new way of denigrating “the people” and glorifying the elites? It might be more of the latter than you think, according to a fascinating paper by French political sociologist Annie Collovald. The concept of populism has basically done a 180, as it moved from a label…
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Cultural capital approaching 60
Cultural capital will soon turn 60 (I’m folllowing Johan Heilbron, who in the Dictionnaire International Bourdieu dates the concept to the publication of Les héritiers in 1964). A lot has happened to that concept throught its long life. In a new paper, Mike Savage, Annick Prieur and I discuss some recent studies and reflect on…
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What’s useful in Marxism?
What’s useful in Marxism and what should be discarded?[1] That’s the question Anthony Giddens set out to answer in a book that came out 40 years ago: A contemporary critique of historical materialism: Vol 1 – Power, property and the state. Even beyond the beautiful cover design, the book merits serious consideration. It is one…
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Ordinary relationships to politics: Interview with Daniel Gaxie
A few years ago, I presented what later became this paper at a conference in Florence. I met some colleagues there that were utterly surprised that I was compeltely unaware of the work of Daniel Gaxie. Luckily, a few months after that, CAIRN published the digitial version of Le cens caché, Gaxie’s first major work,…
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Notes on Bernard Lahire’s The Plural Actor
Last summer, I finally managed to read Bernard Lahire’s The Plural Actor (2011, French original from 1998). What follows is a slightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote then. The Plural Actor presents itself as a critical discussion of sociological theories of action, but mostly it’s about Pierre Bourdieu’s «theory of habitus». Generally speaking,…
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Giddens’ strange neglect of Bourdieu
One thing that has puzzled me was how Giddens would write essays on almost any major figure or strand in social theory — from Durkheim to Habermas via Goffman; even Frank Parkin, André Gorz and Ulf Himmelstrand — but almost nothing on Bourdieu. In the first instance, this is strange because they had a theoretical…
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Magne P. Flemmen 