2023/04/01 by Will Atkinson
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cultural Industries and Urban Development #Music History and Culture #Social and Cultural Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1177/07255136231165045
openalex publication_date 2023/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Michael Burawoy’s recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu’s own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master’s thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This article responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a ‘thicker’ conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy’s arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project.