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••• Derek Robbins •••

School is the state school where young people are turned into state persons and
thus turned into nothing other than henchmen of the state. Walking to school,
I was walking into the state and, since the state destroys people, into the insti-
tution for the destruction of people.
(Bourdieu, 1998: 35)

He suggested that the passage from the novel suited his intention well since his pur-
pose in the lecture would be to ‘subject the state and the thought of the state to a
sort of hyperbolic doubt’ (ibid.: 36). The lecture was delivered not long after the pub-
lication of La noblesse d’état (1989) – translated into English as The State Nobility in
1996 – in which Bourdieu had analysed the ways in which French private educa-
tional institutions – grandes écoles – were instrumental in perpetuating the political
power held by a privileged minority in French society, but a similar point had been
made much earlier in ‘Systèmes d’enseignement et systèmes de pensée’ (1967) –
translated into English as ‘Systems of education and systems of thought’ in M.F.D.
Young, Knowledge and Control (1971). At that date, Bourdieu was trying to define his
position in relation to structuralism. He had recently completed his translation of
Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought (published in French in 1967)
and was recognizing – as he was to make explicit in ‘On Symbolic Power’ (given as a
lecture at Harvard in 1973 and published in English translation in J.B. Thompson
(ed.) Language and Symbolic Power, 1991b) – that Panofsky had taken neo-Kantianism
beyond Cassirer’s analysis of transcendental symbolic forms towards a sociological
analysis of the mechanisms of domination involved in imposing homologies
between educational practices and social tastes. Panofsky had shown that the struc-
tural affinity between Gothic architecture and scholastic thought had been socially
constructed through the agency of the curriculum of cathedral schools. The struc-
tured mindset was not a function of universal human characteristics but the conse-
quence of particular social conditions. The dominant architectural taste of the period
was a function of the dominant schooling. This revelation showed Bourdieu that he
needed to develop an understanding of potential strategies which might enable indi-
vidual agents to challenge the mechanisms by which minds are controlled.
Alongside Bourdieu’s conviction that social control insidiously exercised by ‘neu-
tral’ state apparatuses had to be opposed, was an equally strong conviction that
dominant institutions and dominant modes of thought can only be modified or sub-
verted from within – that oppressive structures can only be changed by a process of
reconstruction which does not deny the phenomenal reality of what prevailed
before. The kind of poststructuralist position that Bourdieu was beginning to articu-
late during the 1960s did not seek to negate the benefits of structuralist analysis. On
the contrary, the accumulated systems of thought of previous generations are
inscribed in human agents by a process of inter-generational transmission. New gen-
erations are the ‘inheritors’ of the old and their dispositions to act – their habitus, to
use Bourdieu’s term – are circumscribed by early upbringing. These inherited and cir-
cumscribed dispositions engage with objectivated structures which are themselves
institutionalized forms of dominant habitus. Human agency involves the exercise of
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