Introduction

This chapter will examine the question of whether Bourdieu's social theory can be mobilised to understand our recent and ongoing global economic crisis. This may seem an odd question to pose on many fronts, not least because – and with the exception of markets for normatively defined cultural goods – Bourdieu's corpus is rarely, if ever, called upon to engage with strictly economic processes and formations. And this is the case despite the fact that Bourdieu (2005 [2000]) dedicated a whole volume to the study of the social structures of the economy and despite the fact that in his later, arguably more polemical, work (Bourdieu, 1998; 1999 [1993]; 2003 [2001]) he directly engaged with the political economy of neo-liberalism, mounting a sustained critique of what he termed the ‘tyranny of the neo-liberal market’.

Yet, while this is so, Bourdieu's social theory is widely critiqued for its lack of traction in regard to economic processes, not least because of its inability to grasp the specificity of capitalist economic relations. Craig Calhoun (1993), for example, has argued that despite the emphasis we find in Bourdieu on the forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986), what is striking is that nowhere in Bourdieu's social theory do we find an elaboration of the specificity of capitalist capital. Thus, while Bourdieu understands the various capitals he describes as comprising accumulated labour, he fails to specify what differentiates capitalist capital from such labour.