Bourdieu pointed out, this was exceptional. Schooling was easily mobilized to reproduce inequality. Middle-class families could do more to prepare their children, and schools made their children feel more comfortable. The children of workers or peasants often felt out of place. Schools used tests to give an apparently objective measurement of performance, but children were not on a level playing field in the first place. And at every stage, there was sorting in which some children were destined for advancement. The “destiny” was not supernatural, however, not even natural. It was at least largely the product of different levels of investment in the children – by their parents, sometimes by teachers, by the state when they were sent to the “better” schools at higher levels and eventually to the top universities. The children of elites were inheritors of their parents’ advantages not just by means of direct financial transmission but by the indirect means of schooling.11
Bourdieu was influenced by both Weber’s analysis of status hierarchies and Goffman’s account of the presentation of self in everyday life. He saw society as organized largely through making distinctions – from what food or music or art we like to what political candidates or potential romantic partners.12 In the abstract, these reflect cultural categories and their structured relations – the food is hot or mild and we label it with ethnic categories such as Mexican or Japanese; the music is raucous or mellow and we label it in genres such as rap or jazz. But each person develops tastes based on experience that is socially ordered, not random. And acting on tastes is always a kind of performance in relation to others. Showing what one likes, that one knows how to use chopsticks, or that one knows how to behave in a fancy restaurant or a loud club is also showing that one fits in to certain groups and sometimes showing off.
Seemingly individual tastes, thus, reproduce unequal social organization – elites are more likely to enjoy classical music or jazz and know how to behave in fancy restaurants; they are more likely to have higher education and lots of money. Everyone may want more money, but they do not necessarily want the tastes elites have, and they like the company of people who share their tastes. And, the formation and expression of tastes is shaped not only by hierarchy but also by oppositions: jazz is more popular among Black elites and those on the Left; classical music is more white and conservative.
Classifications are occasions for struggle, and what Bourdieu called “symbolic violence.”13 When women are told they are “naturally” more emotional and less rational, or when some forms of sex are said to be “unnatural,” this is symbolic violence. The politics of gender seeks to redefine how women are seen and thus what opportunities they have. Struggles for gay rights seek changes in both laws and attitudes that reflect negative classifications.
For Bourdieu, this social organization of tastes is part of a more general theory of inequality, power, and action. The different forms of capital are all distributed unequally: wealth, the cultural capital of prestige, the educational capital of credentials, the social capital of connections. They give people different chances in life as well as different tastes. Lack of capital brings suffering; greater capital confers power. In modern societies, power and capital are organized into fields linked to different kinds of institutions and production: business, government, law, education, health, religion, literature, and art. Each field has its own hierarchy, forms of capital, and characteristic habituses. As C. Wright Mills argued, branches of the power elite may all be connected, but each field is shaped by an interest in maintaining its autonomy. The government seeks not to be collapsed into business; business (or capitalism more generally) seeks not to be dominated by the government. All the cultural fields seek autonomy from both business and government. But, they also need support from markets or the state, so they have to manage these boundaries. And inside each field, there is opposition between those with more autonomy and those with less.
Foucault
Another widely influential contributor to contemporary sociological theory was Michel Foucault (also excerpted here). He was a classmate and friend of Bourdieu’s, and they shared both an enduring focus on unequal power and the perspective sometimes called “poststructuralism.” The label is potentially misleading for both produced classic works of structuralist analysis. But both also sought to move beyond more or less static approaches, integrating attention to enduring patterns in social and cultural structure with a focus on change and the dynamics of individual action.
Foucault focused on the relationship of power to knowledge, on the relationship of both power and transformations of knowledge to the constitution of modern individuals, and on the development of new techniques of governance and administration – what he called governmentality – that work through positive means more than negative applications of force.
In an early study, Foucault examined the social construction of “madness” and its relationship to shifting ideas of correct knowledge and development of institutions of confinement and eventually psychiatric treatment.14 He continued with The Birth of the Clinic, which included an examination of how the “medical gaze” objectified the body and then more general studies in the formation of kinds of knowledge – different “knowledges” – in distinct historical epochs.15 These studies came together to shape Foucault’s two most important projects.
Discipline and Punish is Foucault’s account of how modernity reshaped law enforcement and with it helped to make the modern person. An older logic of punishment had used dramatic public executions and other physical punishments to make moral examples of criminals. There was no expectation of rehabilitating them, though they might seek to save their souls by confessing their crimes. By contrast, the modern era developed prisons to take prisoners out of the public gaze (as asylums had done with the mad – now called mentally ill). In place of punishment, there was a new emphasis on surveillance. This constant monitoring was evident in the very design of prisons and used in an effort to remake prisoners. By some standards this was more “humane,” but it was also a new extreme in social control. All of modern society was reshaped by surveillance, Foucault suggested, including policing but also social work and the collection of all kinds of statistics. This was complemented by governmentality, as citizens were given incentives – sometimes subtle and even hidden – to conform to social norms or government policies. Above all, citizens were made into the agents of their own self-discipline.16
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault again noted a modern disciplinary regime. Governing sexuality became an important religious concern, producing a new regime of internalization of responsibility combined with confession. This required constituting a “truth” of sexuality. This involved not just a classification of the morally acceptable and unacceptable but development of the ideas of “normality” and deviance. In addition, sexuality was essentially as something basic to who one is by contrast to sexual practices as some things one does. Along with the idea of normality, ideals of “performance” were deployed both in hostility toward homosexuals and other “deviants,” and in anxieties to conform to expectations, the proliferation of “self-help” and “how-to” books and comparisons of each individual’s own experience to that in movies or literature.17 This was part of the constitution of the modern individual by disciplinary power.
Individualism ideologically presented the self as the fount of freedom, but in fact it was an effect of disciplinary practices. Deployed not only in prisons but also in clinics, schools, workplaces, and even through shopping, these made individuals the agents of self-discipline on behalf of social norms. But, modern states do not rely only on these regimes of disciplinary power. They also use what Foucault called “Biopower.” Here, the object of attention is not the individual as such, but whole populations in which individuals are sorted by statistics on everything from birth to life expectancy to public health and processes such as sex and conception, migration, aging, and death are all managed.
Race, Gender, and Intersectionality
Race and gender are central dimensions of inequality. However, race and
