Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Preliminary Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
- 1 Between Structuralism and Theory of Practice: The Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
- 2 Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist?
- 3 From Marx to Bourdieu: The Limits of the Structuralism of Practice
- 4 Durkheim and Bourdieu: The Common Plinth and its Cracks
- 5 With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu
- 6 Bourdieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle
- 7 Elias and Bourdieu
- 8 Bourdieu and Adorno on the Transformation of Culture in Modern Society: Towards a Critical Theory of Cultural Production
- 9 The Grammar of an Ambivalence: On the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in the Critical Theory of Axel Honneth
- 10 Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion
- 11 Bourdieu's Sociological Fiction: A Phenomenological Reading of Habitus
- 12 Overcoming Semiotic Structuralism: Language and Habitus in Bourdieu
- 13 Social Theory and Politics: Aron, Bourdieu and Passeron, and the Events of May 1968
- 14 Intellectual Critique and the Public Sphere: Between the Corporatism of the Universal and the Realpolitik of Reason
- 15 Practice as Temporalisation: Bourdieu and Economic Crisis
- Afterword: Concluding Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
- Plate section
5 - With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Preliminary Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
- 1 Between Structuralism and Theory of Practice: The Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
- 2 Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist?
- 3 From Marx to Bourdieu: The Limits of the Structuralism of Practice
- 4 Durkheim and Bourdieu: The Common Plinth and its Cracks
- 5 With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu
- 6 Bourdieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle
- 7 Elias and Bourdieu
- 8 Bourdieu and Adorno on the Transformation of Culture in Modern Society: Towards a Critical Theory of Cultural Production
- 9 The Grammar of an Ambivalence: On the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in the Critical Theory of Axel Honneth
- 10 Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion
- 11 Bourdieu's Sociological Fiction: A Phenomenological Reading of Habitus
- 12 Overcoming Semiotic Structuralism: Language and Habitus in Bourdieu
- 13 Social Theory and Politics: Aron, Bourdieu and Passeron, and the Events of May 1968
- 14 Intellectual Critique and the Public Sphere: Between the Corporatism of the Universal and the Realpolitik of Reason
- 15 Practice as Temporalisation: Bourdieu and Economic Crisis
- Afterword: Concluding Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
- Plate section
Summary
Question: When did you start to familiarise yourself with the work of Max Weber? If I understand you correctly, this happened during your time in Algeria. What sort of texts were you reading at that time?
Pierre Bourdieu: I began with Die protestantische Ethik. During that time, I was working on a book which was intended to summarise my research on Algeria. In Die protestantische Ethik there was an abundance of things on the traditional, pre-capitalist ‘spirit’, and on economic behaviour – wonderful descriptions which were very useful and indeed quite impressive. I drew on Weber's work in order to understand the M'zab, a stretch of land in the Arabic desert, inhabited mainly by Kharijites, who are Muslims with a very ascetic – and almost ‘Puritan’ – lifestyle and whom we might want to call ‘the Protestants of Islam’, a religious current. This was really mind-boggling; this austerity with regard to sexual morals and self-discipline. At the same time, these are really prosperous and forward-looking traders; in fact, a lot of the small businesses in North Africa belong to them. I was astounded by the typically Weberian connection between religious asceticism and this very smooth adjustment to new conditions. By the way, similar to the Calvinist Puritans, these people are highly educated: they read a lot, they read the Qur'an, almost all of the children go to school, and most of them are bilingual in Arabic and French.
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- Information
- The Legacy of Pierre BourdieuCritical Essays, pp. 111 - 124Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011
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