On the Appropriate Use of the Divergences between History and Sociology

The first of Bourdieu’s Collège de France lectures, Sur l’État, is based upon both a critical analysis of the historians’ work on the topic and on a massive reliance on a historical approach in order to establish the theory of the monopolization of legitimate symbolic violence that underlies Bourdieu’s perspective. The paper examines Bourdieu’s use of history and of comparison, and indicates a number of differences with the main orientations of contemporary historiography, which focuses mostly on “legitimate” physical violence. Similarly, while Bourdieu follows a long-term perspective going back to the Middle Ages, historians, even when they are influenced by structural sociology, emphasize much more the discontinuities and the discrepancies between the emergence and the consolidation of different types of states in recent periods. This lecture does open new perspectives, but, being provisional and unfinished like any lecture, it does not provide a complete and exhaustive theory, which a prolific bibliography constantly expels from the realm of what is thinkable. As a result, the dialogue between history and sociology is more necessary than ever, but it must also take place on a renewed basis, rather than on obsolete quarrels. Comparatism has been criticized so frequently in the name of catch-all paradigms, but it turns out to be indispensable, not least because its practice is made more difficult by the fragmentation of existing work that currently prevails in this field. Sur l’État provides some hints as to how this can be done.