Acting Through the Margin of Freedom: Bourdieu as Social Movement Theorist

• In Event: 352 - Theory Section Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Classic Theorists: Marx, Weber, Bourdieu

Abstract

This paper reconstructs a neglected aspect of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical corpus, the consistent analysis of collective actor formation and mobilization that recur throughout his career. While the paper does not claim that Bourdieu should be properly reconceived as primarily a social movement theorist, it does claim that by examining Bourdieu’s theorization of collective actor formation and mobilization, we can gain a much broader and more hermeneutically accurate sense of Bourdieu’s ideas concerning social change, and in particular, social change effected by social agency. Beyond interest in Bourdieu’s thinking itself, this paper suggests several ways in which Bourdieu’s formulations of social movement processes articulate with, and perhaps shift the ground in contemporary research on social movements.
In particular, the paper unpacks the interrelated mechanisms that combine in unique ways across cases in Bourdieu’s discussions of collective action. However, unlike other mechanisms based approaches, Bourdieu gives cultural meaning pride of analytical place. Finally, the paper points to the potentially productive role the concept social imaginary could play in expanding conceptions of the political underlying social movement scholarship. In addition to contests over material resources and symbolic recognition, the political can be conceived as a struggle over the effective vision of the future. Despite critics who suggest otherwise, this paper argues Bourdieu’s theorizations of collective action possess vital resources for just such an expansion of our analytical vision.

Author

• Daniel Aaron Sherwood, The New School for Social Research