How did it happen? Asking this question is obviously assumed that things would have been different. We could have such enthusiasm for other approaches of sociology. The sociology of Bourdieu does not happen by itself. For example, writing Heinich if Bourdieu from ideal (eg meritocratic republican ideal of social mobility) to oppose to it the denial of reality (the low social mobility), we might as well, to the Conversely, from the reality (the absence of social mobility, long thought to be inevitable) to show how it has been transformed (even partially, incompletely) by the ideal. Similarly, we can "consider that there are several levels of" hidden "from simple to deliberately concealed implied, including the demonstration does not necessarily subject to the same operation or the same subject, that the mistakes of others and scholars the illusions of actors are perhaps not to put on the same plane; and that we may also seek to "understand" the reasons for the latter, rather than dismissing them out of hand outside the sociological field of investigation "(p. 87). (This distancing of this approach, the former student of Bourdieu wrote that she conquered herself little by little.)
What has driven so many people to pay their claims to the sociology of unveiling hidden interests, as practiced by Bourdieu and his followers? Heinich sets out a series of reasons that could account for this phenomenon. And not only sociological reasons in the strict sense: the author takes on the hat of the historian. She noted for example that the political commitments Bourdieu were phases with different social movements (the first, anti-statist, sixty-eighters; then, from the 1990s, one, statist opponents of globalization).
Among the reasons mentioned, Heinich back repeatedly the design "agonistic" sociology practiced by Bourdieu. A sociology of "combat" in which colleagues disagree are enemies driven by obscure interests of domination, against which we must band together. A sociology unveiling hidden interests, which throws its audience in the stunning, by "the effect produced by the power of one who knows, and who says, on the one who did not know until then, and remains silent. It is the effect produced ahead of the one who possessed the secret, without anyone knowing, especially when this secret, once said, arouses the feeling of being done by forces that we do not control, but which other than itself have at least knowledge. " (Pp. 159-160) A sociology of guilt, to which the audience also gives its membership not to be on the side of the fault - the dominant that have an interest in it is not recognized.
Another interesting element: the pages devoted to the "double discourse" this very clever rhetoric used by Bourdieu to conceal the paradoxes of his position. For example, the ways in which he could put an asymmetry in order to evade his own theory incognito to its theoretical program ideas to interest reduction.
The author's style is very elegant. I have some reservations: for example, the criticism of Jeffrey C. Alexander (The reduction criticism Bourdieu) seems very cavalierly dismissed (p.168-169). Weber's sociology to which there is recourse for camping Bourdieu between domination "charismatic" prophet and domination "legal", could be questioned. These are details. (. Thus the sociology of "charisma" is just used as a shortcut shorthand to describe the fascination caused Bourdieu) In general, we have a very interesting book, straddling genres: history ideas, political history, memories, testing, sociology, etc. By taking one and then another of these genres, the author also proposes, casually, his record (theoretical and ethical) of Bourdieu's sociology:
"Sadness of a routinized sociology, mechanical, hence disappeared making the salt of the search:. The pleasure of discovering a lawn mower sociology, where the landscape obtained on arrival looks exactly like that we imagined at the start: a disenchanted world, empty of values, ratiboisé exclusively planted with habitus and positions in the field of symbolic violence issues and struggles, dominant and dominated, guilty and wicked poor victims. Sad kingdom. " (P. 174)
