Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being

In Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, Ghassan Hage explores the great French social theorist’s work and revitalizes conventional and undertheorized aspects of his thinking. Hage focuses on Bourdieu’s concern with social being and what constitutes a worthwhile and fulfilling life. Such a life is not something that one either has or does not have; rather, society distributes and assigns values to ways of living. These values are structured by relations of power and domination and are subject to the outcome of political conflicts. Hage elucidates this political economy of being by reworking Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, illusio, symbolic capital, and field. In this political economy, people enjoy a worthwhile life to the degree that they are able to orient and deploy themselves practically in the world that surrounds them, have a sense of purpose, and achieve a level of social recognition. For Hage, the project of theorizing and understanding how people struggle to define, legitimize, and live a viable life in the face of symbolic domination permeates all of Bourdieu’s work.

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne and the author of several books, including The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism and The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World.