Bourdieu's philosophical anthropologies: Exploring and Marxifying his framework for academic field research
Date
2025
Authors
Zipin, L.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2025; 57(8):674-780
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
Philosophical anthropologies (PAs)–ontological assumptions about human species-nature–have long faced Foucauldian post-structural rejection of their value and legitimacy in explaining sociological problematics. In this article I endorse Bourdieu’s resistance to a post-PA momentum, arguing that PAs need assuming in sociological research. In the process, I explore PAs within Bourdieu’s research framework, including how his key empirical-analytic concepts–‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘illusio’ and ‘forms of capital’–echo the PAs he assumes. Yet I argue his conceptual framework would do better without a PA he sometimes explicitly invokes: a ‘libidinal’ drive to compete for power in ‘games’ of social-field labour. I then draw on data from a survey of Australian education academics, who comment on how workforce restructures negatively affect their research and teaching labours. From the data, I argue that assuming a power-competitive PA as a driver of field labours inhibits attention to ethically-motivated desire for better labour purposes, fuelling critically-reflexive capacities to challenge field-structured power games. In turn, I diagnose that Bourdieu’s conceptual framework needs, but lacks, Marxian assumption of a human-species impulse for labours to serve use-valued social purposes, and that commodification of labours generates emotional alienation. I therefore suggest a ‘Marxification’ of Bourdieu’s framework.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Data source: supplemental material, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2025.2459082
Access Status
Rights
Copyright 2025 The Authors. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Access Condition Notes: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.