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On the State (Hardcover)
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On the State (Hardcover)
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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 D 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
College 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.
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