Pierre Bourdieu and the Peculiarities of Sociological Knowledge

Defined neither by a well circumscribed subject-matter and a corresponding form of professional expertise, like psychology or economics, nor by a shared point of view like history and perhaps philosophy, sociology has traditionally aspired to be the most general social science. Since notions as ‘human society’ or ‘social processes’ that are commonly used to characterize the sociological perspective do not provide more than a terminological minimum, the actual practice of sociologists is best understood in its intellectual context, that is, first and foremost, in relation to other disciplines and sub-disciplines. Wolf Lepenies has thus shown that sociology may be understood as belonging to a ‘third culture,’ one that is uneasily situated between the humanities and the natural sciences, and within which humanistic as well as scientistic orientations coexist and collide (Lepenies 1988). A similar observation holds for sociology in relation to the other social sciences. For institutional reasons, French sociologists have predominantly defined themselves in relation to philosophy, traditionally the ‘crowning discipline’ (Jean-Louis Fabiani) in the Faculty of Letters. Depending on the local and the national context, other sociologists have allied themselves with history, anthropology, or economics. Sociology’s claim of being the most general social science is thus inseparable from its varied relations to other disciplines and domains of knowledge.