Devlet Üzerine: College de France Dersleri

by Pierre Bourdieu, Aslı Sümer (Translator)

“Devlet ne egemenlerin hizmetindeki bir iktidar aygıtına ne ihtilafların soğurulduğu tarafsız bir mekâna indirgenebilir: Devlet, hayli ileri derecede ayrışmış toplumlarda, toplumsal hayatın bütününü yapılandıran müşterek inanç formunu oluşturur.”
Bourdieu

Devlet Üzerine, dünyaca ünlü Fransız sosyolog Pierre Bourdieu’nün 1989’la 1992 arasında Collège de France’ta verdiği derslerin notlarının derlenmesiyle oluştu. Devlet, yazarın sosyolojik analizinde son derece merkezî olan ama nadiren böyle algılanan bir analiz konusudur. Bu kitap, Bourdieu’nün diğer çalışmalarında dolaylı biçimde ele aldığı devlet sorununu analizinin merkezine yerleştirerek incelediği yegâne çalışmasıdır.


“Zor sorular bu noktada belirmeye başlar. Devlet hakkında kolay laflar edilebilmesinin sebebi, devlete dair söylemin üretici ve alımlayıcılarının, hem duruş hem gelenek olarak biraz anarşist bir yatkınlığa, iktidarlara karşı toplumsal olarak tesis edilmiş bir isyan eğilimine sahip olmalarıdır.”
Bourdieu

Genres: Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Social Science

495 pages, Paperback

First published January 5, 2012

About the author

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

These lectures delivered over 3 years at the College de France expose the state - and our abiding belief in it - as a 400-year old political fiction brought to life by its many agents through their collective acts done in the name of the state. If this sounds tautological, it is - the state exists because we act as if it does. Its power is dispersed through rituals and routines that may seem innocuous or inevitable - the calendar, geography, spelling, licenses, disciplines taught in school as discrete knowledges, housing practices, taxes - but that make its subjects serve it and those who have access to its symbolic capital. To read the state at this level (where it is brought into being in both long range and intimate day to day ways) requires Weber, Marx and Durkheim to bear.

[Felipe Feitosa Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sempre que me debruço sobre Bourdieu chego à mesma conclusão: se foi cedo demais. E essa série de aulas é prova definitiva de quão inteligente e complexo (sem tender ao complicado) o pensamento (sempre em movimento, diga-se de passagem) de Pierre Bourdieu sempre foi. Sobre o Estado é mais do que uma coleção de palestras, é uma chance de espiar o que ainda poderia ser caso o sociólogo ainda estivesse vivo.

Leitura obrigatória.

[SirriCan · Rating 5 out of 5]

çok iyi.

[Dayton Fernando]

2014

[Haitam]

sa fé reflexir

[FJXenoF · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bourdieu is a brilliant thinker, but a mediocre rhetorician. Most annoying are his slanderous remarks about Marxism. He caricatures the ideas of Marx to make his own seem more original. Classic example: he claims that the ideas of lawyers are products of their material struggle about power and influence, but you should not use the base/superstructure model to analyze this! (For the uninitiated: what Bourdieu describes here is an excellent illustration of the base/superstructure model, where the superstructure (culture, ideas, institutions) are constructed over a material base.)

[Ezgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

While criticizing the conventional approaches to state including Weberian, institutional and particularly Marxist approaches; Bourdieu mainly addresses the ways of analysing the state and suggests an ethno- methodological approach as a way to analyse this “unthinkable object”. At least you have to ask anthropological, ethno methodological questions together with the global questions to have adequate questions on the state (p.171). State is primarily a legitimator.