materialism and teleology, and instead emphasised how theory and theorist are inescapably part of the world they study.
If one is looking for reasons for their extraordinary theoretical convergence, their parallel biographies are a good place to begin. Unique among the great Marxist theoreticians, Gramsci – like Bourdieu – came from a poor rural background. They were similarly uncomfortable in the university setting, although for Gramsci this meant leaving the university for a life of journalism and politics, before being unceremoniously cast into prison by the fascist state. Bourdieu, by contrast, would make the academy his home, climbing to its very peak and becoming a professor at the Collège de France. It was from there that he made his sorties into political life. No matter how far removed they became from the rural world into which they were born, neither ever lost touch with that world. They both made the experience of the dominated or subaltern an abiding preoccupation.
Given the similarities of their social trajectories and their common theoretical interests, their fundamental divergences are all the more interesting – closely tied, one might conjecture, to the very different historical contexts or political fields within which they acted. Gramsci, after all, remained a Marxist and engaged with questions of socialism at a time when it was still very much on the political agenda, whereas Bourdieu distanced himself from Marxism, prefiguring what would become a post-socialist world. A conversation between Bourdieu and Gramsci built on their common interest in cultural domination promises to clarify their divergent politics. I begin such an imaginary conversation by tracing the intersection of their biographies with history, and then I draw out the parallels in their frameworks, before examining their divergent theories of cultural domination – hegemony versus symbolic violence – and their opposed theories of intellectuals.
PARALLEL LIVES OF PRACTICE
In seeking to comprehend human political interventions, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – the embedded and embodied dispositions acquired through life trajectories – invites us to examine the intersection of biography and history. The political lives of Gramsci and Bourdieu are the cumulative effects of four sets of experiences: (1) early childhood and schooling that saw each migrate from village to city in pursuit of education; (2) formative political experiences, i.e. Bourdieu’s immersion in the Algerian revolution and Gramsci’s participation in the politics leading up to the factory council movement; (3) theoretical development – for Bourdieu in the academy, for Gramsci in the communist movement; and (4) final redirections, in which Bourdieu moves from the university into the public sphere, while Gramsci is forced to retreat from party to prison. At each successive moment, Bourdieu and Gramsci carry with them a habitus or, as Gramsci (1971: 353) calls it, the précis of their past, which guides their interventions in new fields.
Both Gramsci and Bourdieu grew up in peasant societies. Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891; Bourdieu was born in 1930 in the Béarn in the Pyrenees. Both were children of local public employees: Bourdieu the son of a postman who became a clerk in the village post office; Gramsci the son of a clerk in the local land registry who was imprisoned on charges of malfeasance. Bourdieu was an only child, but Gramsci was one of seven children, all of whom played a major role in his early life. Both were very attached to their mothers – in both instances women from higher-status peasant backgrounds than their husbands. They both shone at school and by dint of willpower advanced from their poor villages to metropolitan centres, each with the support of devoted schoolmasters.
Undoubtedly, Gramsci’s life was more difficult. Not only was his family far poorer, but he also suffered from the physical and psychological pain of being a hunchback. Only with his deep reserves of determination and with support from his elder brother could Gramsci in 1911 make his way to the mainland of northern Italy, after winning a scholarship to study philosophy and linguistics at the University of Turin. In similar fashion, Bourdieu would make his way to the preparatory lycée and then enter the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy, the apex of the French intellectual pyramid.
Coming from rural background to the urban metropolis, whether Turin or Paris, was daunting – both were fish out of water in the new middle- and upper-class milieu of the university. Bourdieu writes of his disjoint habitus: ‘the durable effect of a very strong discrepancy between high academic consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions’ (2007 [2004]: 100). Although they both became brilliant intellectuals and political figures, neither lost touch with the sources of his marginality, his village and his family. Gramsci’s devotion to his family and rural mores is captured in his letters from prison, just as Bourdieu remained similarly close to his parents, returning home periodically to conduct field research. Their rural upbringing is deeply embedded in their dispositions and thought, whether by way of an obdurate legacy or a vehement reaction.2
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