Bourdieu, Ethics and Symbolic Power

Bourdieu, ethics and symbolic power

Léna Pellandini-Simányi

Abstract

This article critically discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s views on ethics and normativeevaluations. Bourdieu acknowledged that people hold ethical stances, yet sought toshow that these stances are – unconsciously – conducive to obtaining symbolicpower and legitimizing hierarchy. The first part of the article looks at this argumentand charts the shifts it went through particularly in the early 1990s. The second partdiscusses ontological and empirical critiques of the ethics as ideology argument andsuggests the latter to be more salient, as Bourdieu proposed his argument as anempirical rather than as an ontological point.The reason why he nevertheless foundthe ethics as ideology explanation fitting to nearly all the cases he studied, as thethird part argues, is not simply that reality ‘obliged’ him to do so, but his circulardefinition of symbolic capital as qualities that are worthy of esteem. This definitionmakes his argument of ethics as ideology unfalsifiable and impedes him fromdistinguishing between cases when legitimate power is the aim of ethics andbetween those when it is merely their side effect.The article concludes by suggestingways in which Bourdieu’s work can be fruitfully incorporated into the study ofethics once the tautology is resolved.

Keywords: Bourdieu, esteem, ethics, sociology of morality, symbolic power

Introduction

The sociological study of ethics and morality has taken diverse paths from thebirth of sociology as a discipline in the 19th century. Durkheim (1993) andWeber (2003) attributed a central role to ethics (or ethos) in explaining socialand economic phenomena. Marx (1977a, 1977b), in contrast, radically ques-tioned the explanatory power and hence the importance of ethics, by arguingthat values merely reflect structures and interests defined by economic rela-tions. Following this tradition, critical sociologists analysed people’s normativestances mainly as covert interests. The study of ethics qua ethics in this tradi-tion was seen not only as futile, but also harmful: values considered as ideo-logies were seen as something to be unmasked rather than acknowledged(Sayer, 2004). Recent years, however, witnessed a renewed interest in thestudy of everyday ethics as a phenomenon that is related, yet not reducible toeconomic relations and interests (see, for example, Bauman, 1993; Laidlaw,

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The Sociological Review, Vol. 62, 651–674 (2014) DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12210© 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Publishedby John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148,USA.

2002; Sayer, 2005, 2011; Abend, 2007; Evens, 2008; Zigon, 2008; Hitlin andVaisey, 2010). This is the field that this article wishes to contribute to byproviding a critical discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s dismissal of ethics.

Bourdieu’s work is important in this regard because it contains some of themost well-developed arguments that posit ethical stances as covert means ofpower struggles. Bourdieu did not suggest that people do not engage in nor-mative evaluations; on the contrary, he emphasized the centrality of evalu-ations in everyday life. However, in the predominant part of his work heinterpreted these as covert competitive strategies to advance one’s positionand legitimize power (Bourdieu, 1984, 1991a, 1991b). His works are so all-encompassing – ranging from religion (Bourdieu, 1991a) to art (Bourdieu,1996), science (Bourdieu, 1999a, 2004), and everyday taste (Bourdieu, 1984) –that if one is to study everyday ethics qua ethics, one almost inevitably comesacross a relevant work of Bourdieu that argues one’s efforts to be futile. Thisis why the study of ethics qua ethics can only proceed if one is able to showwhere Bourdieu’s arguments, by which he dismisses it, are found wanting.Thisis the focus of the current article.

The article starts by outlining Bourdieu’s position on ethics, charting theshifts that it went through and the tensions that exist within it. This partsuggests that although the argument that sees ethics as a pretext for power-struggles – characterizing most of his oeuvre – is mitigated in his worksfollowing the early 1990s, he did not revise his original position, merely com-plemented it by exceptions (as in the case of science) and somewhat incon-sistent additions. The second part discusses the two main lines of existingcriticism of Bourdieu’s dismissal of ethics. The first challenges Bourdieu onontological grounds, proposing a view of humans as ethical beings as opposedto the power-driven depiction posited by Bourdieu (Honneth, 1986; Taylor,1989; Evens, 1999; Sayer, 2005). The problem with this line, as this part argues,is that Bourdieu did not mean his arguments to be ontological but empiricaland, in principle, falsifiable. The second line of criticism attempts such anempirical falsification (Lamont, 1992; Sayer, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot,2006), however, all empirical counterevidence listed by these theories seemsreconcilable with Bourdieu’s theory. This leads to the core question of thearticle: How does Bourdieu manage to maintain the claim that all seeminglyethical actions are objectively power-driven? The answer, proposed in thethird part, lays in his tautological definition of symbolic capital as esteem. Asesteem is granted on an ethical basis – as it involves looking up at someone forworthy qualities – an esteem-based hierarchy always presupposes ethics. Thismeans that Bourdieu is only able to show that all ethics are objectively power-driven because his very concept of legitimate power is grounded in an ethicallybased notion of esteem. The article concludes by outlining ways in whichBourdieu’s work can be usefully incorporated into the study of ethics, oncethis tautology is corrected.

Before moving to the main analysis, a note on what I mean by the term‘ethical’: I will use the words ethics, morality and normative evaluations


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interchangeably1 to denote stances that Charles Taylor refers to as ‘strongevaluations’ (Taylor, 1989: 74). ‘Strong evaluations’ are normative principlesthat are experienced as independent from personal inclination – and aretherefore different from preferences – constituting outer standards by whichour very desires can be judged: ‘We sense in the very experience of beingmoved by some higher good that we are moved by what is good in it ratherthan that it is valuable because of our reaction’ (1989: 74). This formulationimplies a descriptive rather than a substantive, normative use of the term‘ethical’: what makes an idea ‘ethical’ is the fact that for particular people itrepresents a way of living or being that they consider higher as opposed tobeing simply more desirable. The advantage of this descriptive definition isthat it allows for the empirical analysis of very different normative stances –even of those that the analyst might happen to disagree with. Also note thatunlike some theories of ethics that treat agency as the prerequisite of ethicalaction,2 the conception of ethics used here does not require agency, but alsoincludes the unreflexive adherence to existing moral traditions.

Bourdieu’s shifting views on ethics

Bourdieu dedicated a large part of his work to the analysis of normativeevaluations people pass: he studied the basis on which honour is granted inAlgeria (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990b), the qualities that the French educationsystem values (Bourdieu, 1988), the evolution of the criteria that define goodart (Bourdieu, 1996) and the normative distinctions people make in theireveryday life under the heading of ‘taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984). His position onthese normative stances – although containing some contradictions that will bediscussed shortly – can be classified as social constructivist.3 Social construc-tivism sees ethics as a matter of social agreement. This distinguishes it fromobjectivist theories that argue that the definition of the ‘good’ and what isvaluable can be grounded in something objective: in human nature and needs,or in the intrinsic qualities of goods and practices (Sayer, 2011). Yet socialconstructivism also differs from subjectivist or emotivist theories that suggestthat the definition of the good is subjective, simply a matter of individual likesand dislikes (Taylor, 1989). First, social constructivism suggests that ethicalstandards are beyond individuals; as Taylor argues ‘Each young person maytake up a stance which is authentically his or her own; but the very possibilityof this is enframed in a social understanding of great temporal depth, in fact“tradition” ’ (Taylor, 1989: 39). Second, unlike emotivism, most social con-structivist theories do not see ethics as preferences, but as ‘strong evaluations’(Taylor, 1989: 74) in the sense described above: as qualities and principles thatpeople experience as higher external standards by which their own conduct isto judged. Yet, unlike objectivist theories, they locate the source of theseexternal standards in society and culture rather than in human nature.


653© 2014 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2014 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

Social constructivism can be further divided into two camps, based onhow the content of the ethics reached through such a social agreement isexplained: with reference to interests of the dominant group, or to culturaltraditions that are independent from socio-economic relations (see secondpart for further discussion). In this debate the largest part of Bourdieu’swork falls into the former camp: he interpreted evaluative stances first andforemost as a means by which struggles over power are fought. This position,however, shifted and carried a number of contradictions. The major shifttook place in the early 1990s (Sintomer, 1996; Fáber, 2007; Fowler, 2011)when Bourdieu took a more explicit stance on political matters, which wasrelated to the revaluation of his relativist views on science and to a limitedextent, on ethics. In this section I look at his views on ethics before and afterthe shift.

Ethics as ideology

Bourdieu’s explicit position on ethics until the early 1990s was informed bytwo related points. First, he suggested that people incorporate different con-ditions of existence as well as existing moral frameworks through the habitus.The habitus is a largely unconscious, internalized, even bodily sense of thesocial world acquired through upbringing. It delimits tastes, bodily gestures,ways of eating, sitting and talking; in short, everything we think and do,including our normative ideas (Bourdieu, 1984, 1995). This argument lendsitself to the interpretation proposed by Andrew Sayer (2011), according towhich our ethical stances are developed as part of our habitus. For example,Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) includes vivid descriptionson how the sense of honour, a deeply ethical sense of how a man of virtueshould behave, and more broadly, what it means to be a proper man is ‘incul-cated in the earliest years of life’ until it becomes a ‘permanent disposition,embedded in the agents’ very bodies in the form of mental dispositions,schemes of perception and thought, extremely general in application’ (1977:15). Similarly, in Distinction he describes how ‘world views’, ‘philosophies oflife’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 292) and ‘a sense of belonging to a more polished, morepolite, better policed world’ (1984: 76) are learnt and transmitted throughpractice. This argument, in itself, does not say that normative stances areideological, unconsciously aimed at legitimizing power; simply that personalethics are partly developed through acquiring a practical and symbolic senseof a historically, socially and culturally located position through upbringing.The habitus, understood this way, offers grounds for understanding ethics notonly as abstract ideas but as an embodied and practical sense of the good (see,for example, Shove, 2003; Lakoff and Collier, 2004; Skeggs, 2004; Sayer, 2005;Ignatow, 2008; Introna, 2009; Pellandini-Simányi, 2009; Slater, 2009; Sayer,2011).4

The second point, on which I wish to focus in this article, explains ethicsas unconscious competitive strategies to maintain and advance one’s position



and to acquire and legitimate power. Bourdieu calls legitimate power‘symbolic power’, by which he means the kind of power that is reinforced byauthority (as opposed to, say, sheer force). He suggests that symbolic power isthe prime target of social life, which is therefore depicted as a struggle ‘to wineverything which, in the social world, is of the order of belief, credit anddiscredit, perception and appreciation, knowledge and recognition – name,renown, prestige, honour, glory, authority, everything which constitutes sym-bolic power as recognized power’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 251).

The struggle for symbolic power unfolds between groups, defined by spe-cific sets of capitals and their relations to one another (Bourdieu, 1984).Groups try to acquire symbolic power, firstly, by playing according to theexisting rules, that is, by maximizing the ‘symbolic profit’ (1984: 270) on theirexisting assets, without putting into question the basis on which symbolicpower is granted. This unconscious drive to maximize symbolic profit – dictat-ing different strategies in the light of specific compositions of capitals –explains for example evaluative, normative stances to art: ‘The preference ofintellectuals – characterized by low economic and high cultural capital – forcheaper, avant-garde art theatre is governed by the pursuit of maximum“cultural profit” for minimum economic cost’, expecting ‘the symbolic profit oftheir practice from the work itself, from its rarity and from the discourse aboutit (after the show, over a drink, or in their lectures, their articles or their books)through which they will endeavour to appropriate part of its distinctive value’(1984: 270). Note that what Bourdieu describes here may well be experiencedby the agent as genuine intellectual curiosity; yet his point is that objectively itis merely a strategy that leads to the highest symbolic profit that can beacquired given a specific set of capitals.

Secondly, groups also try to change the rules in their own favour: theystruggle over the basis on which symbolic capital is granted so as to increasethe value of their existing assets. Every group tries ‘to impose the taxonomymost favourable to its characteristics, or at least to give to the dominanttaxonomy the content most flattering to what it has and what it is’ (Bourdieu,1984: 475–476). In other words, every group has an interest in promoting itsown qualities as the most valuable ones, as this would give grounds for legiti-mate power over other groups (Bourdieu, 1991b). For example, if an intellec-tual manages to impose her value system on others – who are not fromintellectual families, therefore come with a different habitus and a lower levelof ‘cultural capital’ – and hence others adopt and measure their own worthaccording to how culturally sophisticated they are, she created a situationwhere she comes out winning. Others will look up at her and accept hersuperiority. She gained symbolic power. ‘Adapting to a dominated positionimplies a form of acceptance of domination . . . the sense of incompetence,failure or cultural unworthiness imply a form of recognition of dominantvalues’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 389).5 This is why Bourdieu suggests that what aFrench intellectual proclaims to be the ethical value of cultural sophisticationis – objectively – nothing else than an unconscious competitive strategy: it is



about attaching higher evaluation to qualities that one gained through one’supbringing in order to establish one’s legitimate claim to power.

Bourdieu makes this argument with respect to social groups (see, forexample,Bourdieu, 1984),as well as to the struggles within and between specificfields (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1996, 2000). Fields are organized aroundspecific stakes that all participants of the given field pursue. These stakes arealways a form of symbolic power, which is granted on different grounds in eachfield.For example, in the scientific field scientific expertise and new,truer resultsgrant symbolic power, whereas in the autonomous artistic field artistic achieve-ment does. The qualities and achievements that are valued within a given fieldcould be read as their central values or founding ethics. However, Bourdieuargues that these seemingly disinterested ethics are guided objectively by thesame logic of competition for symbolic power between groups of differentcapital compositions described above: each tries to give a definition of whatcounts as a valuable achievement and who can be considered a genuine memberof the field that is most favourable to it:‘Each is trying to impose the boundariesof the field most favourable to its interests or – which amounts to the same thing– the best definition of conditions of true membership of the field (or of titlesconferring the right to the status of writer, artist or scholar) for justifying itsexistence as it stands’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 223). This is why the prime form ofantagonism is always ‘between orthodoxy and heresy . . . the struggle betweenthose who espouse conservatism because of the dominant position they tem-porarily occupy in the field (by virtue of their specific capital) . . . and those whoare inclined to a heretical rupture, to the critique of established forms, to thesubversion of the prevailing models’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 234). For example, novelnormative visions of good art by an artist, or a new morality preached by aprophet can be understood objectively as best strategies of groups whosecapital composition is not valuable enough according to the existing rules, whotherefore try to get new valuations accepted. Bourdieu’s point, in other words,is that stances that seem and are experienced as disinterested and ethicalcorrespond, objectively, to the best strategies that particular capital composi-tions permit in the struggle over power within a given field.

How are people’s normative stances synced with those required by thesestruggles? People enter – unconsciously, guided by their habitus – those fieldsand within them those positions where they can expect the ‘highest profit’ (interms of power) on the kinds of capitals and habitus that they possess(Bourdieu, 1990a, 1996). For example, the habitus and cultural capital ofsomeone from a French intellectual family will grant her a higher position inthe academic field than in, let’s say, football or the church (Calhoun 2003), soshe is more likely to enter that field. Her habitus and capital portfolio will alsodefine which position within the chosen field she will enter: that of the con-servator or the rebel, depending on which position promises her higher sym-bolic profits.

Once having entered a position in a given field, its occupant is moved by therequirements of the position: ‘the institutional space, in which all social agents



. . . have their places assigned to them, produces so to speak the properties ofthose who occupy them, and the relations of competition and conflict which setthem against each other’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 193–194, emphasis in the original),as a result of which occupants of these positions ‘unless they exclude them-selves from the game, have no other choice than to struggle to maintain orimprove their position in the field’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 193). In this sense it is notso much the agents, but the positions that they occupy that are competitive andpower-driven and that move the people occupying them according to theirlogic.

In this scheme, ‘all actions, even those understood as disinterested or non-purposive, and thus freed from economic motives, are to be conceived eco-nomically’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 235), as a means to maximize symbolic profit.Albeit this view of social life may seem close to rational action theory,Bourdieu clearly distinguishes his position from that school by emphasizingthat the struggle for power does not take place through conscious strategies,but intuitively (Bourdieu, 1990b). Partly because it is guided by the habitusthat provides an unconscious sense of the social world; and partly because it ismoved by the requirements that a specific position in any given field exerts onits occupant (Bourdieu, 1990a).

Based on this depiction, Bourdieu suggests that even though people maysubjectively experience their actions as value-driven, objectively these norma-tive stances can be shown to be conducive to acquiring power.As Sayer (2005:42) argues:

At one level, Bourdieu recognized the deeply evaluative character of socialbehaviour in terms of how people value themselves and members of othergroups, and the practices and objects associated with them. However hisinterests in this regard lay primarily in the valuation of these things instrategic, functional and aesthetic terms. This is partly a consequence of hisinterest- and power-based model of social life, and his adoption of a “her-meneutics of suspicion” that is reluctant to acknowledge disinterestedaction, including ethical responses. Any ideas that certain actions may bedisinterested are quickly deflated by deriving them from their habitus andinterests (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984).

Bourdieu applied this theory to a wide array of fields from religion to art andscience, arguing that normative views within these fields are to be understoodas a product of the competing positions within and between them. However, asSayer points out, alongside these explicit arguments, he seemed to hold animplicit, ‘crypto-normative’ (Sayer, 2005: 99) stance that condemned socialinequalities and injustice (see also Evens, 1999, 2008). This stance informs hiswork, for example, on the education system and taste, which expose the hiddenmechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced and naturalized.Applying his theory to analyse this stance would mean that his own view ofinequality being a bad thing is merely the best means, in the light of his



capital-composition, of advancing his position within the scientific field. YetBourdieu surely did not see his indignation over injustice in these terms, but asan ethical stance that is – at least in part – beyond the struggle for power. Infact, his very concept of mis-recognition suggests that the ‘good’ can be estab-lished with reference to objective standards outside power-struggles (Sayer,2001, 2003, 2005).

Sayer suggests that these objectivist stances represent a contradiction toBourdieu’s avowed relativist position, according to which the definition of thegood is a matter of power-struggles. This point is correct if we read Bourdieu’stheory as a general one, applying to all human actions. In my reading(explained in the next section), however, he sought to provide descriptions ofparticular empirical cases, and did not exclude in principle the existence ofother cases when ethics are not driven by interests. If my reading is correct, theobjectivist stances signal not a contradiction, but a gap in Bourdieu’s theory:whereas he gives abundant descriptions of cases when ethics are unconsciousmeans by which people advance their own power position, he did not exploreany instances when normative views are not ideological – including his owncase, which he, as his implicit crypto-normative language suggests, presumablyconsidered as such.

The normative shift of the 1990s

The late 1980s, early 1990s marked a change in Bourdieu’s views on ethics,which is related to his ‘political turn’ and to a partial revision of his originalrelativist position (Sintomer, 1996; Fáber, 2007; Fowler, 2011).6 From the early1990s Bourdieu increasingly took part in political action – for example, he gavea talk at the railway workers’ demonstration in 1995 (Wolfreys, 2000) – andtook a more explicit normative stance in his writings on current social andpolitical matters. For example, in his political essays collected in PoliticalInterventions he attacks neoliberal regimes that produce an ‘extraordinarymass of suffering’ (Bourdieu, 2008a: 102) and in an interview with TerryEagleton (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992) he is explicit about the elimination ofhuman suffering as the ultimate benchmark of the ‘good’.This more objectivistapproach to ethics is clearly articulated in the Pascalian Meditations, where heargues that:

sceptical or cynical rejection of any form of belief in the universal, in thevalues of truth, emancipation, in a word, Enlightenment, and of any affir-mation of universal truths and values, in the name of an elementary form ofrelativism which regards all universalistic manifestos as pharisaical tricksintended to perpetuate a hegemony, is another way, in a sense a moredangerous one, because it can give itself an air of radicalism, of acceptingthings as they are.

There is, appearances notwithstanding, no contradiction in fighting at thesame time against the mystificatory hypocrisy of abstract universalism and



for universal access to the conditions of access to the universal, the primor-dial objective of all genuine humanism which both universalistic preachingand nihilistic (pseudo-) subversion forget. (Bourdieu, 2000: 71)

These arguments are clearly at odds with his ‘standard’ theory, outlined above,that posits hidden power-interest behind ethical stances. In order to reconcilethese arguments, he needed either to complement his work with a descriptionof the conditions under which the ethics as ideology argument does not apply;or, if it was meant to be a general description, to revise the theory altogether.He did indeed make steps to both directions to accommodate this now explicitnon-relativist position; yet these changes, I will argue, remained partial, result-ing in a somewhat contradictory theory.

First, major modifications of his original position focused on his argumentson the scientific field, which after the early 1990s appears to be the exceptionalarea where people are able to break free from the power-driven logic.Whereasin The Specificity of the Scientific Field (Bourdieu, 1999a), published originallyin 1976, he provided a ‘standard’ analysis of science – where scientific argu-ments are described as matters of power struggles – in Science of Science andReflexivity (Bourdieu, 2004), published in 2001, the scientific field is posited asa field where a transhistoric, universal truth can be arrived at. Reflexivity – ofsociologists in particular – seems to be the key to apprehend and overcomesocial determinism and the power-driven logic characterizing other fields, as‘sociologists can find weapons against social determinism in the very sciencewhich brings them to light’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 178). It is this knowledge thatenables, and in fact, obliges them to take part in political matters (Bourdieu,1989).

The special status of the scientific field means that it could be the empiricalcase, missing from his earlier work, where ethics qua ethics could be analysed.Unfortunately, Bourdieu does not provide such an analysis. Rather, he limitshis arguments to the possibility of achieving Truth, rather than Ethics.Although he urges intellectuals to engage in political issues (‘Our dream, associal scientists, might be for part of our research to be useful to a socialmovement’ – Bourdieu, 2008b: 58), he warns them that they ‘should not fallinto the trap of offering a program’ (2008b: 56): their role should be limited toproviding statements of facts rather than value-judgements. Bourdieu resolvesthe apparent contradiction between this argument and his explicit normativeposition by suggesting that good sociological descriptions talk for themselves,automatically leading to the ‘good’, that is, to the eliminations of suffering andfreedom. For example, they have a liberating effect as they give voice to people(Bourdieu, 1999b), helping them ‘express what they suffer’ (Bourdieu andEagleton, 1992: 121), and they pinpoint the ways in which social determinismcan be overcome, allowing people to ‘equip themselves with specific weaponsof resistance’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 340). In this light, what I called his explicitnormative position can be interpreted as not even a normative position, butsimply a set of statements of facts of suffering, exploitation and unfreedom.



However, in itself the statement of these facts should not have any normativeimplications: unless one holds the normative position that exploitation is a badand freedom is a good thing, one should feel no moral indignation. This isclearly not the case with Bourdieu, which suggests again an implicit ethicalstance in his work.Yet his writings fail to provide grounds for such a normativeposition even in this period, as the question of how ethics qua ethics is possible,if at all, is evaded by the above argument that only discusses the possibility ofinterest-free factual statements.

The second, much less developed, yet more fruitful modification ofBourdieu’s original theory can be found in traces in the Pascalian Meditations(Bourdieu, 2000), where he offers a somewhat different interpretation ofrecognition, which is the essence of symbolic capital. Whereas in earlier writ-ings he described recognition and symbolic capital largely in terms of theireffect of legitimizing power, here he suggests that they are central to humanontology and a meaningful life. He argues that as children grow up in thedomestic field they move from a stage of narcissistic self-love to a stage wherethey discover themselves as an object of others and start to seek theirapproval. This process, suggests Bourdieu, ‘relies [my emphasis] on one of themotors which will be at the origin of all subsequent investments: the search forrecognition [emphasis in the original]’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 166). In this text hesuggests that the search for recognition is a universal human quality, the verybasis of our human, social nature; though even here he sees it as a form ofself-love rather than ethics (‘Such might be the anthropological root of theambiguity of symbolic capital – glory, honour, credit, reputation, fame – theprinciple of an egoistic quest for satisfactions of amour propre which is, atthe same time, a fascinated pursuit of the approval of others’ (Bourdieu, 2000:166, emphasis in the original).)

Furthermore, the pursuit of symbolic capital in this text is equated with thesearch for recognition, which appears here not simply as a means of acquiringpower, but as central to a meaningful life:

The social world gives what is rarest, recognition, consideration, in otherwords, quite simply, reasons for being. It is capable of giving meaning to life. . . One of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case,the most cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is of socialimportance and of reasons for living . . . Conversely, there is no worsedispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in thesymbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognized socialbeing, in a word, to humanity. (Bourdieu, 2000: 240–241)

This suggests that social games are moved by the quest for a meaningful life,a purpose, a social mission without which, as he argues, people sink intoindifference and depression (Bourdieu, 2000: 240). He uses the term ‘illusio’for this belief that the stakes of social games and fields in particular are worth



pursuing. Although it is an illusion in the sense of lacking an objective basis, itis still essential for the participation in social games that provide the meaningof life.

These arguments are somewhat inconsistent with his standard depiction ofethics as a means of acquiring power. In fact, as we will see in the next sections,the very same points form the basis of theories that argue, against Bourdieu,that ethics are not reducible to power-struggles, but often stem from thehuman pursuit of meaning and purpose. My own view, explained in the thirdpart, is that the two positions are not necessarily contradictory; in fact, nor-mative evaluations are double-faceted in that they simultaneously involveethics and allow for the legitimization of power. The problem is, however, thatBourdieu does nothing to explain how the two points can be reconciled, butpresents these arguments alongside his original theory, as seamless additionsto, rather than as a revision of it. In the very same text he writes that ‘it iscompetition for a power that can only be won from others competing for thesame power, a power over others that derives its existence from others, fromtheir perception and appreciation’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 241) and that ‘symboliccapital . . . is not a particular kind of capital but what every kind of capitalbecomes when it is misrecognized as capital, that is, as force, a power orcapacity for (actual or potential) exploitation, and therefore recognized aslegitimate’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 242). This way these arguments, although prom-ising, remain unconcluded.

In the following sections of the article therefore I will focus on the originalargument that seeks to expose the ideological nature of ethics, which despitethese modifications represents his most well-elaborated position.

Critiques of Bourdieu’s view on ethics

Against the view that sees ethics as covert, unconscious means to acquirepower, a number of recent works have argued for treating ethics and norma-tive evaluations as autonomous phenomena that can be related, but notreduced to power motives. These theories challenge the ethics as ideologyargument on two grounds: ontological and empirical. Albeit empirical dataalways require interpretation that is in turn informed by ontological assump-tions (see next part), the distinction is useful here to capture the distinct focusof the critiques.

Ontological critiques

Authors proposing an ontological argument suggest that – contrary to thepower-driven picture painted by Bourdieu – holding normative, ethical stancesis an inevitable, intrinsic quality of being human. Sayer, for example, arguesthat we are ‘evaluative beings’ (2005: 139), not because it helps us to acquirepower; rather it is ‘vulnerability to suffering and capacity for flourishing that



gives experience its normative character, and from which “the force of theought” as regards ethical matters derives’ (Sayer, 2009: 12).

A related ontological point is put forward by Charles Taylor (1989), albeiton different grounds. He also argues that people are inherently evaluativebeings, yet not because of their capacity to suffer and flourish, but becausemoral agency is the basis of identity. Identity depends on taking a position withrespect to strong evaluations, which makes evaluative choices an imperative ofbeing human:

Living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of humanagency, that stepping outside these limits would be tantamount to steppingoutside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged humanpersonhood . . . To know who you are is to be oriented in the moral space,a space in which questions arise about good or bad, what is worth doing andwhat is not, what has meaning for you, and what is trivial and secondary.(Taylor, 1989: 27–28, my emphasis)

This does not mean that people behave morally at all times; but that takingcertain moral positions is the very essence of being human, therefore aninescapable human condition.

Axel Honneth (Honneth, 1995; Fraser and Honneth, 2003) puts forward asimilar idea in that he sees moral integrity and personhood as the core ofhuman life. According to him personhood is dependent on recognition byothers (an idea also strongly present in Taylor’s 1994 work), therefore hestresses the interdependence between respect and self-respect. For him,normative evaluations are understood as part of the core human pursuit ofrecognition:7

[T]he reproduction of social life is governed by the imperative of mutualrecognition, because one can develop a practical relation-to-self only whenone has learned to view oneself, from the normative perspective of one’spartners in interaction, as their social addressee. (Honneth, 1995: 92)

These critiques are important, as any project that seeks to acknowledge ethicsqua ethics is only made possible by an ontology that does not see humans asintrinsically power-driven. Yet they are insufficient to disprove Bourdieu’sarguments because he did not intend them as a description of human ontology,but of particular, historically specific empirical realities. For example, in aninterview with Terry Eagleton he talked about the possibility of other forms ofactions:

Terry Eagleton: That is a true description of many fields of our experience,but are there not other forms of discourse, other forms of action, which youcouldn’t conceptualize so easily in those agonistic terms?



Pierre Bourdieu: . . . [T]hat is an important question, and one that I askmyself; I agree that it is a problem. I don’t know why I tend to think in thoseterms – I feel obliged to by reality. My sense is that the kind of exchange weare now engaged in is unusual.Where this happens, it is the exception basedon what Aristotle called ‘philia’ – or friendship, to use a more generalexpression. ‘Philia’ is, according to Aristotle, an economic exchange orsymbolic exchange that you may have within the family, among parents orwith friends. I tend to think that the structure of most of the fields, most ofthe social games, is such that competition – a struggle for domination – isquasi-inevitable. (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992: 116)

There are indeed parts of Bourdieu’s work, for example in the Outline(Bourdieu, 1977), that suggest that he saw this ‘logic of philia’ as informing the‘good faith economy’ of the Kabyle in Algeria, in contrast to profit-maximizingWestern capitalism. In this reading, the competitive, instrumental logicdescribed above is a historical product that emerged only with modern capi-talism, rather than a universal human characteristic (Fowler, 2011).

Empirical critiques

If the reduction of ethics to power-struggles is not an ontological argument, itfollows that it can be questioned empirically rather than on ontologicalgrounds. These empirical critiques have been formulated along two majorlines.8

The first suggests that Bourdieu ignored the normative operations andmoral distinctions that people make in everyday life. For example, Boltanskiand Thévenot (2006) suggested that traditional critical sociology, andBourdieu in particular, underestimated the critical capacity of agents and theyargue that people do engage in normative evaluations and judgements. Similarpoints are made by Lamont (1992), who provides the empirical evidence ofmoral distinctions that people use to evaluate each other, as well as by Sayer(2001, 2005, 2009, 2011).

The problem with these critiques is that showing that people take norma-tive stances and that they experience their motives as ethical does not sufficeto falsify Bourdieu’s ethics as ideology argument.The core of that argument isnot that people do not engage in normative operations, but that they do so inways that help them to advance their own position in the hierarchy. In fact, inBourdieu’s account the subjective experience of genuine, disinterested nor-mative judgement is essential for the legitimatization of hierarchy (Bourdieu,1984, 1991a, 1991c, 1993). This means that it is not enough to show that peoplesee themselves as evaluative beings, as it could fit into the ethics as ideologyaccount as well; what needs to be proven is that these evaluations cannot beexplained simply in terms of power interests.

This is the focus of the second line of empirical criticism that argues that thecontent of ethical ideas cannot be derived from power interests, but from



sources that are independent from these struggles. What are these othersources? One line of critique is based on an objectivist approach to values,mentioned in the previous part, that suggests that what people value can belinked to relatively universal, objective standards of human needs (Sayer,2005).9 The difficulty of this theory is that in order to disprove Bourdieu, onewould need to show that certain qualities are highly valued independently ofsocial and cultural settings. This is probably possible if we define these valuedqualities loosely enough to accommodate plurality, as Sayer (2011) suggests;but then the theory becomes too vague and loses its explanatory power. If onthe other hand, we define them narrowly, such a universal applicability isimpossible to show: what people consider valuable, worthy of respect variesacross fields, cultures and goes through temporal change. The theory then isunable to account for what has been the key question of Bourdieu: why thesevaluations differ (between and within groups) and why they change (forinstance, in the field of art).

Another line of critique comes from social constructivist theories that agreewith Bourdieu in that the content of ethics is a matter of social agreementrather than deducible from an objective standard, yet they contend that it iscultural tradition, rather than mere power relations that explain them(Calhoun, 1991).10 At one end are theories that – in line with the ‘strongprogram of cultural sociology’ advanced by Jeffrey Alexander (Alexander andSmith, 2001) – explain ethics by the autonomous, internal development ofculture that is independent from socio-economic structure. Boltanski andThévenot’s (2006) work on systems of justifications, each of which is centredon a particular ‘worth’ – which, in my reading, correspond to particular ethics– lends itself to this interpretation, as they explain the emergence of eachsystem of ‘worth’ by the internal development of cultural traditions.11

Other theories within the same line take a more balanced approach, main-taining that ethics are shaped both by cultural traditions and power-struggles.For example, Lamont argues that ‘cultural repertoires’ – that include ethics –depend not only on socio-economic factors, but also on cultural resources thatare independent from them, such as national traditions. Furthermore, shedraws attention to the temporal dimension that allows even those ethicalstances that once reflected group interests to become independent: ‘[culturalrepertoires] need to be analyzed separately because, even if these repertoiresare shaped by a wide range of economic, political, and socio-historical factors,they take on a life of their own once they are institutionalized. In other words,they become part of the environment, of the structure . . .’ (Lamont, 1992:135).

Similarly, Honneth acknowledges that ‘economically powerful groups dohave a considerably greater chance of institutionally generalizing their ownvalue conceptions in society and thereby increasing the social recognition oftheir own conduct of life’ (Honneth, 1986: 65), yet he maintains that economicpower alone is not enough. Cultural traditions, treated here as interrelated yetautonomous explanatory factors, play a larger role:12



[T]he recognition which an existing social order lends to the values andnorms embodied in the life-styles of a particular group does not depend onthe volume of knowledge or wealth, or the quantity of measurable goodsthe group has managed to accumulate, rather it is determined accordingto the traditions and value conceptions which could be socially generalizedand institutionalized in the society. (Honneth, 1986: 65)

The problem with this counterargument is that Bourdieu did not claim that itis always the group possessing the highest economic and cultural capital that isable to set the standards of values in its own favour. As it will be discussed inthe next section in detail, he held that capitals resulting in a dominant positionare dependent on fields and societies. This is why he would be able to refutethe above counterargument by showing that ‘traditions and value conceptions’themselves reflect certain group interests.

The fact that all these empirical critiques seem to be reconcilable withBourdieu’s theory raises the question of whether it is possible even to envisagean empirical instance that would contradict it. In the next section I argue thatthe answer to this question is negative: the possibility of such an instance isforeclosed by a circularity in Bourdieu’s argument. This is the reason why,rather than being ‘obliged by reality’, the ethical actions in all the cases studiedby him appear to be ideological.

Circular definition of symbolic capital

Why is it that in nearly all the cases studied by Bourdieu seemingly ethicalpursuits turned out to be, at the end, hidden strategies to acquire power?Evens (1999, 2008) suggests that the answer lies in fact that albeit Bourdieuclaimed that his description merely reflected reality, his own taken-for-grantedlens through which he interpreted reality was ultimately biased towardspower-driven interpretations. Indeed, as noted previously, the clear separationbetween ontology and empirical data applied so far does not take account ofthe epistemological point that data do not speak for themselves, but are alwaysfiltered through interpretation. According to Evens, Bourdieu’s avowedempiricist position implied a particular ontological assumption according towhich people are moved primarily by power, and it is this assumption thatdrove him to interpret even ethical action in those terms.

Evens links ethics to agency, suggesting that ‘Because all of our decisionsultimately rest on our decided agential capacity, in the end all must be aquestion of ethics’ (Evens, 2008: xxii). This is why for him, Bourdieu’s inabilityto acknowledge ethics qua ethics is ultimately rooted in his tendency to fallback to a deterministic, objectivist view of human action despite his claim ofovercoming the subject–object dualism. The solution therefore, according toEvens, is an ontology that recognizes agency and therefore ethics. Similarly toSayer and Honneth discussed above, he maintains that ‘human practice is a



question of value qua value, which is to say, a question of ethics’ (Evens, 1999:4); however, unlike them, he does not propose a fixed, singular ontology, but aheterodox one with crosscutting materialist and ethical motives. As he pointsout, the existence of materialist motives does not contradict an ethics-centredontology: material gain and power need to be valued first in order to bedeemed worthy of pursuing, hence their appreciation implies an initial ethicalchoice. As he argues, ‘Though in a plain sense wealth and power sum upantivalue, they are themselves products of moral selection, and thus they toopresuppose the possibility of value as such’ (Evens, 1999: 20), therefore eventhese motives are ‘always already ethically informed and determined’ (Evens,1999: 7).

The implication of Evens’s critique is that viewed through Bourdieu’s inter-pretative lens – informed by a materialist ontology – all data will be inter-preted as demonstrating the existence of underlying power motives; in otherwords, the theory becomes unfalsifiable. To trace this process we need to askfirst what kind of empirical material would be necessary to falsify Bourdieu’stheory of ethical stances as unconscious means of the pursuit of power. Itwould need to be first, an ethical position that is not conducive to acquiringand legitimizing power; and second, an instance where ethics cannot beexplained objectively by the interest of the more powerful group.

Can there be an empirical case of ethics that is not conducive to symbolicpower? Hardly. Bourdieu defines ‘symbolic power’ as power based on rec-ognition: ‘renown, prestige, honour, glory, authority’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 251).What he describes here is what Honneth (1995; Brink and Owen, 2007) callsesteem, and what Charles Taylor (1994) refers to as conditional recognition.The essence of these – and of Bourdieu’s notion of recognition – is that theydenote respect which is granted based on one’s achievements and qualitiesthat people recognize as valuable, as worthy of their admiration.13 This meansthat all forms of symbolic power presuppose a normative evaluation, anunderlying ethics. This is not to say that everybody will participate in par-ticular fields out of pure dedication, but that symbolic power is only possibleif there exist field-specific ethics that participants accept regardless of howwell they stick to them in their actual conduct. Without them, achievementsand qualities would not yield esteem and any conception of symbolic powerwould be impossible.

However, all ethics automatically and inevitably create different degrees ofesteem and hence a hierarchy. This is because ethics denotes ‘strong evalu-ations’, that is, normative distinctions between better and worse: being adedicated mother or a devoted scientist is not simply different from being areckless one, but normatively better. If I think that being a good mother orscientist is something worthy of my awe, this belief will automatically create ahierarchy in the way I see people. This is why, as Dumont argues, ‘to adopt avalue is to introduce hierarchy, and certain consensus of values, a certainhierarchy of ideas, things and people’ (Dumont, 1970: 20). In fact, as Evenssuggests ‘without value there can be no hierarchy’ (1999: 20). Every ethics



produces a sense of legitimate hierarchy; and any legitimate hierarchy can onlybe based on a shared system of valuation, on a shared ethics.

This means that ethics is always conducive to ‘symbolic power’; but notbecause of an underlying, unconscious competitive logic that it masks, but dueto its normative nature, which always implies a hierarchy. As symbolic poweris recognition granted based on ethical qualities, it is an inevitable side-effectof any particular ethics.14

At points, Bourdieu himself noted this double-faceted nature of symbolicpower. For example, he argued that ‘[society] alone has the power to justifyyou, to liberate you from facticity, contingency and absurdity; but – and this isdoubtless the fundamental antimony – only in a differential, distinctive way:every form of the sacred has its profane complement, all distinction generatesits own vulgarity’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 196). However, he failed to see that theconsequence of this argument is that it is the very nature of ethics that impliesrecognition and symbolic power rather than a hidden competitive drive.

The main problem of this tautology is that it renders Bourdieu’s explana-tion unable to distinguish between cause and effect in particular empiricalcases. In some cases the pursuit of power creates what look like values fromthe inside. In other cases, however, the commitment to particular, historicallyspecific ethics and the drive to be better according to them is what creates ahierarchy – and what induces actions that may look like mere competition –from the outside. In these cases, what provides the energy that sets the fieldin motion is not simply an invisible underlying competitive power motive, butthe nature of ethics itself. It is the essence of ethics that it exerts a bindingforce, and hence the very impetus that pushes one to be better accordingto its principles. The motive to become a good scientist, a good artist, or agood mother can be seen as aims worth pursuing irrespective of the power thattheir achievement grants (see also Sayer, 2005, on internal goods). Yet inBourdieu’s tautological framework in both cases ethics is interpreted aspretext for legitimizing power.

A related tautology provides the key to the second question, of whether itis possible to find empirical instances where ethics cannot be explained objec-tively by the interest of the most powerful group. To unravel the tautology weneed to start by having a look at what such an objective analysis means inpractice. The most powerful group is defined objectively in terms of its capitalcomposition. Bourdieu’s concept of capital retains some aspects of Marx’s useof the term (Calhoun, 1993). It is an accumulated product of effort, hence ameans of transmission: parents can pass on their money, connections andcultural capital to their children, who can therefore start from a better position(Calhoun, 2003). Yet Bourdieu also extends Marx’s notion; in Distinction(Bourdieu, 1984) he focuses on three sorts of capital: economic, social andcultural (I treat symbolic capital separately).

There are two possible ways of interpreting the notion of capital and,correspondingly, the argument according to which the most powerful group, interms of capital composition, determines the dominant ethics. First, we can see



these capital forms as universally applicable, which I would like to call thestable view. This view suggests that these capital compositions denote objec-tive relations that will universally determine subjectivities in predictable waysregardless of social setting. In this interpretation, Bourdieu uses France inDistinction as an example of an argument that could be made anywhere else inthe world. Lamont (1992), for example, treats capitals as stable, when based onempirical evidence gathered in the US she suggests that Bourdieu overesti-mated the importance of cultural capital and generalized a characteristicallyParisian situation. The argument in this form can be falsified by studies likeLamont’s.

The second interpretation treats capitals as field-dependent. I think thisreading is more correct, as Bourdieu writes that capitals are ‘species ofpower . . . whose possession commands access to the specific profits that areat stake in the field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1989: 39). According to thisdefinition, capital denotes the power by which the stakes – which, let’s notforget, are always forms of legitimate power – of a specific field can beacquired. This means that capital is not absolute but dependent on the field;different features and possessions serve as capitals in different fields. We cantalk about religious, scientific, cultural or fashion capital (Bourdieu, 1991c,1999a; Rocamora, 2002; Entwistle and Rocamora, 2006), because these termsstand for qualities by which legitimate power can be acquired in particularfields. In this reading, Distinction shows that in contemporary French societylegitimate power can be achieved by three sorts of capital: economic, socialand cultural. In France these are capitals because stakes can be acquired bythem; if in another society other qualities would grant power, they would notbe capitals.

At this point it is important to make a distinction between what I would liketo call ‘instrumental’ and ‘ethical’ capitals. ‘Instrumental capitals’ are thosethat allow one to enter and progress in a given field, yet in themselves do notprovide symbolic capital, legitimate power. For example, becoming an aca-demic requires long years of study that is easier to sustain if one is wellendowed with money; certain positions are easier to get if one has connections,and so on. Yet money and connections alone do not result in symbolic power.An academic with no scientific qualities, who only got a position because sheis the main financial donor of the university, will have power, but not symbolicpower.

To acquire symbolic power, then, one needs more than instrumental capi-tals: qualities that yield esteem. I will call these qualities ‘ethical capital’.Ethical because those achievements and qualities yield esteem that others inthe given group or field recognize as normatively higher, of ethical value.15

Note, again, that I am using ethical in a broad and relativist sense. Amongintellectuals, intelligence and knowledge – which Bourdieu calls ‘culturalcapital’ – are the values that grant esteem, whereas in the religious field pietyyields respect and functions as ‘religious capital’; simply because participantsacknowledge the importance of these qualities as ethical values.



The reason why distinguishing ‘ethical capital’ is important is that it shedslight on the circularity of the argument by which Bourdieu proves that ethicsreflects the qualities of most powerful group, and therefore are more favour-able to that group. He defined capitals as qualities that allow one to acquire thestakes, which are always a form of symbolic power, of a particular field.However, it is only the ‘ethical capitals’ that truly fit the definition; ‘instrumen-tal capitals’ do not grant symbolic power, merely facilitate the achievement of‘ethical capitals’ in some cases.This means that ‘powerfulness’ is defined as thepossession of the sufficient amount and type of ethical capitals; which are, inturn, defined by their ability to grant symbolic power, in other words, respectand recognition. This is why the ‘powerful’ group is by definition the one thatis looked up at and whose qualities are deemed as worthy of respect.Along thesame logic, a position is ‘dominated’ if it lacks ethical capitals, which in otherwords means that the qualities that belong to it are not acknowledged asworthy in a given field or culture. This is why, again, by definition, it will alwaysbe the case that the qualities of the ‘dominated’ are not given enough recog-nition. It is due to this tautology that Bourdieu is always able to prove that theaccepted values belong to the most ‘powerful’ group; and this is the reason whyall empirical counterarguments trying to find instances when ethics are notdictated by the dominant group – just like the one proposed by Honneth at theend of the previous section – can be dismissed by him.

Conclusion

The aim of this analysis was to open up the analytical space for taking ethicsqua ethics seriously by exposing the flaws in Bourdieu’s arguments that dis-count ethics as covert means of the competitive pursuit of power. The pointthat I proposed here is not that people act ethically and out of pure devotionat all times; simply that sometimes they do, yet in Bourdieu’s framework theseoccasions are indistinguishable from those when they – consciously or uncon-sciously – pursue power.16 What I hoped to show is that it is not empiricalevidence that justifies Bourdieu’s scepticism; but a tautology that labels allqualities worthy of esteem as capitals and hence mistakenly sees all instancesof legitimate power as the hidden aim rather than a side effect of normativestances. In contrast to this depiction, I argued that the existence of hierarchyand its acceptance as based on legitimate, symbolic power does not necessarilyindicate an underlying power-motive; ethics also create inadvertently a senseof legitimate hierarchy and hence symbolic power.

If the tautology is resolved, a modified version of Bourdieu’s theory can befruitfully incorporated into the sociological study of ethics. I have alreadymentioned the usefulness of the habitus in understanding the way ethics areacquired and operate in practice. Beyond that, Bourdieu’s concept of the fieldhelps understanding that ethics are not a matter of individual, acultural pref-erences, but exist in historically evolving, culturally specific areas where their



value is recognized and institutionalized. Fields understood this way are theprimary arenas where ethics and the cultural traditions are ‘located’, asopposed to abstract notions of ‘values’ that float somewhere outside society.The notion of illusio provides the useful insight that it is the field that presup-poses and creates devotion to its field-specific ethics (Bourdieu and Wacquant,1989). It is through participating in fields that these ethics can be made ‘alive’,be engaged, reproduced or transformed by people of different ethical dispo-sitions acquired as part of their habitus. Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘complicity’between the habitus and the fields is invaluable in understanding the ways inwhich these personal and field-specific ethical commitments meet and trans-form one another.

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest Received 22 September 2011Finally accepted 16 October 2013

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Agnès Rocamora, Ágoston Fáber, Gábor Vályi, Márk Éber Áron and thethree anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 Some authors (Bauman, 1993; Habermas, 1993; Miller, 1998) use the terms ethics and moralityto distinguish questions of good life from questions of justice. For the purposes of the presentarticle the distinction is irrelevant.

2 Foucault, for instance, used the term ethics to refer to ‘the conscious practice of freedom’ (1997:285), that is, to the conscious process of working on the self through practice. For a similardiscussion of ethics as bound up with agency see also Evens (1999, 2008) and Zigon (2007,2008).

3 The debate in which I describe Bourdieu’s position here refers to how ethics actually works ineveryday life. There exists a related philosophical debate on how it should work, that is, on thebenchmark of the good and the right that can serve as a tenable normative position.These twodebates use the same labels for the schools they describe, which may give grounds for confu-sion. Sayer (2011) provides an excellent discussion of this debate and of the objectivistnormative position that he advances; for a social constructivist critique of the objectivistnormative position see Slater (1997, 1998) and Honneth (2007).

4 At times Bourdieu proposes a materialist reductionist version of this argument. For example,in Distinction he explains normative stances by the different degrees of distance from neces-sity. When proposed that way the argument, as Jeffrey Alexander points out, seeks to ‘sub-merge cultural norms, to demonstrate that they are determined by forces of a . . . material kind’(1995: 135).

5 In this sense not all groups try to attach a positive evaluation to the qualities in which theyexcel, but only the dominant group, as one of the hallmarks of being ‘dominated’ is theacceptance of the existing, unfavourable valuation system.

6 Bourdieu’s early work in Algeria also exhibits a clear political commitment against the suf-fering caused by colonial rule and the Algerian war (see, for example, Bourdieu, 2013). In thissense the political turn in his later work can be seen as a return to this earlier stance.



7 Whereas Taylor uses largely philosophical arguments, Honneth also builds on anthropologyand social psychology to support this alternative ontology. In this sense, Honneth’s point iscloser to the ethical naturalism promoted by Sayer.

8 A third line challenges Bourdieu for not giving enough attention to agency, which is seen bythis line as the precondition of ethics. I do not discuss these theories here because, as Imentioned in the introduction, my use of ethics does not imply agency. For a critique alongthese lines see Evens (1999, 2008) and Sayer (2011); for a discussion of the possibility of agencyas ‘regulated liberties’ in Bourdieu’s work see McNay (1999).

9 Sayer develops arguments both about how ethics actually works and how it should work. HereI only refer to the former, as the latter falls into the philosophical debate on ethics, which isbeyond the scope of the current article.

10 According to Taylor (1989) moral traditions can be traced back to religious and philosophicalmoral sources that we forgot about and therefore we see them as ahistorically universal andbeyond debate. A somewhat similar argument is developed by MacIntyre (1981), in that hesuggests that our ethical values come from earlier traditions that we are no longer aware of.

11 For earlier formulations see Mills (1940); for a detailed discussion on the similarities anddifferences between different branches of repertoire theory and their relation to culturalsociology see Silber (2006).

12 Along similar lines, LiPuma argues that not just any symbol and valuation principle will beaccepted just because it is promoted by the dominant group, but ‘cultural forms exert powerover agents through their meaningfulness’ (1993: 33).

13 Power in itself can also generate admiration, yet in order to be recognized as legitimate power,it needs to be based on qualities deemed as valuable in the given field. This point may be lessevident in certain fields, for example in one where esteem is paid to people who earn the most.Yet certain ethical values lay at the very foundation of even these fields. In the business word,respect paid to high-earners is based on the implicit ethical idea that money – similarly toacademic titles – is a sign of appreciated qualities: an entrepreneurial spirit, hard work andeven aggressive business style (Jackall, 1988; Lamont, 1992). As soon as that assumption doesnot hold – for example, money turns out to have been acquired through cheating or robbery– money no longer yields esteem, which suggests that only these legitimate ethical qualitiesallow money to function as a marker of one’s worth in this field. Max Weber’s (2003) classicanalysis of the ethos of capitalism can also be read along these lines.

14 See also Lemieux (1999), Dreyfus and Rabinow (1993) and Evens (1999).15 In this sense the notion is close to, yet broader than what Swartz (2009, 2010) calls ‘moral

capital’ to refer to ‘those qualities, capacities, intelligences, strategies, and dispositions thatyoung people acquire, possess, and can “grow’ ” in the pursuit of moral maturity, and wheremoral maturity (with its goal of “being a good person”) is related to educational, career, andfinancial success’ (Swartz, 2009: 148).

16 Sayer (2003) uses the distinction between internal and external goods to capture the difference.

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