The Double-Edged Sword of Reason

Meditations pascaliennes is a highly idiosyncratic, even odd, book that juts out in the landscape of contemporary social thought. Part (anti-)philosophical treatise, part manifesto for a resolutely historicist conception of social action, structure and knowledge, and part theoretical stock-taking, explication and extension of a distinctive set of methodological stances and analytical devices tested on a vast and rugged empirical terrain, it is bursting with paradoxes – which, its author reminds us, means a breach of the doxa: here the accepted, taken-for-granted, ways of thinking (and, indeed, being) that undergird all scholarly activity, starting with the historic division and muffled rivalry between philosophy and sociology.1 In this long-gestating, hybrid sequel to Outline of a Theory of Practice and Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu turns the weapons of theoretical reason on to theoretical reason itself and mobilizes the arsenal of philosophy to exorcise the philosophical intellectualism which he regards as the single major impediment to an adequate understanding of practice, power and society. He asserts the radical historicity of social science but also undercuts the facile relativism currently in vogue under the label of ‘postmodernism’. He ruins the claim of philosophy to pure thought and explodes its core tenets in epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, European Journal of Social Theory 2(3): 275–281