Sociology, Science, and the End of Philosophy: How Society Shapes Brains, Gods, Maths, and Logics

Abstract

who gets to profit from it are understood as struggles between the dominant sectors of society fought on the terrain of the French state’s bureaucracy (pp. 122–28). By comparison, Reed-Danahay’s discussion of the nation-state in Chapters Four and Five is less satisfying. In On the State, Bourdieu (2015) characterizes the state as holding a monopoly on symbolic power. This allows the state to, as Reed-Danahay writes, create a shared ‘‘perception of the world, and . . . way of classifying the social order,’’ a doxic ‘‘common sense’’ that creates shared feelings of belonging, affinity, and rootedness, and, when absent, creates foreignness and marginality (pp. 140–42, 166). Linking Bourdieu’s concept of social space to questions of national identify, belonging, and incorporation suggests intriguing opportunities to consider the cognitive aspects of identity and the links between domination, legitimation, and belonging. However, for Bourdieu the state is not only an instrument of doxic submission; the state is also a ‘‘metafield of power’’ whose emergence was tied to the construction of the idea of ‘‘the public’’ (Bourdieu 2015:309–11). This second characterization, which is key to understanding the bureaucratic nature of the state and its ability to wield symbolic power, is largely absent from Reed-Danahay’s analysis. Incorporating it would have allowed Reed-Danahay to push her analysis further while also speaking more directly to Bourdieu’s own interest in the state and its role in the broader conceptual framework he was constructing. By collecting so many of Bourdieu’s writings on space in one place and presenting them so transparently, Reed-Danahay has produced a valuable reference work. As such, this book will be of interest to any scholar interested in approaching space from a Bourdieusian perspective or deepening their understanding of Bourdieu more generally, and it would serve as a helpful companion to Bourdieu’s original work for scholars of mobility. For well-prepared scholars, Bourdieu and Social Space presents the reader with many tantalizing suggestions of Bourdieu’s unruly theory-in-the-making and acts as an invitation for fresh theorizing on the intersections of space, place, mobility, and society.