Category: theory
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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…