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Contemporary Cultural Theory

artistic field had created a zone of autonomy, free from both the
market and politics, in its ‘heroic’ phase, during the latter part
of the nineteenth century. But in the twentieth century, Bourdieu
argued, modernist art had developed not as a critique of the ‘iron
cage’ of instrumental rationality, but as a function of the power
games of the dominant classes, its capacities for critical distance
progressively eroded through cooption by both the market and
the state education system.
Bourdieu detected analogously ‘interested’ processes at work
in the academic intelligentsia. The academic profession is a
competitive struggle for legitimacy and cultural distinction, he
explained, which functions to reproduce the wider structures of
social class inequality: whether applied to the world, to students,
or to academics themselves, academic taxonomies are ‘a machine
for transforming social classifications into academic classifica-
tions’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 207). Later he would stress the central
significance of the elite graduate schools, the so-called ‘grandes
écoles’, to the power of the French social and economic elite,
showing how their credentialism operated as a kind of ‘state
magic’ for a supposedly rationalised society (Bourdieu, 1996a,
p. 374). Tracing the growing incidence of academic credentials
among the chief executives of the top 100 French companies, he
concluded that the apparent substitution of academic for
property titles actually performed a crucial legitimating function:
company heads ‘no longer appear... the heirs to a fortune they
did not create’, he wrote, ‘but rather the most exemplary of self-
made men, appointed by their . . . “merits” to wield power ...in
the name of “competence” and “intelligence”’ (p. 334).
Where the Frankfurt School had worked with a model of
theory as explicitly critical, Bourdieu tended to affect a quasi-
positivistic objectivism, so that the moment of critique was often
concealed behind a mask of scientific ‘objectivity’. In The Weight
of the World, he used a combination of ethnographic interviews
and sociological commentary to mount a stunning indictment of
contemporary utilitarianism—in the shape of ‘economic liberal-
ism’—as creating the preconditions for ‘an unprecedented
development of all kinds of ordinary suffering’ (Bourdieu et al.,
1999). But even here, in his most explicitly engaged work, he still

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