On the State: Lectures at the College de France, 1989-1992.

• Author: Ray, Avishek
• Position: Book review

On the State: Lectures at the College de France, 1989-1992

Edited by Patrick Champagne et al., Translated by David Fernbach

Cambridge: Polity, 2014, 449 pages, $26.53, ISBN: 9780745663296.

This book features Bourdieu's examination of the 'state,' both as a concept and a polity. It touches upon the mechanism, theories and functionality of the state, the rhetoric of the 'official,' the plausibility of an autonomous economic space, issues concerning the concentration and dispossession of capital, which, among other things, offers us a nuanced understanding not only of the modern state and statecraft, but also Bourdieu's purported Marxist affiliation. The book is a compilation of lectures Bourdieu delivered at the College de France between the years 1989 and 1992. Running the risk of missing out on the aural attributes of the lectures, the editors, instead of merely transcribing them, have revised, with complete fidelity to the author, the spoken discourse toward producing a 'complete readable text' for the readers. Besides Bourdieu's erudition, this book, as it stands now--with a profusion of very relevant cross-references and annotations--reflects an exemplary work of editorship.

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Before plunging into the book, one has to remember that Bourdieu's oeuvre, during the course of which he produced some 40 books and more than 200 articles, is not linear. That being said, the thematic trope of the state and power pervades Bourdieu's thought--recall Bourdieu's take on the Algerian question here--right from the very onset. Therefore, in order to make sense of the ideological implications of this book, one has to conceptually map this set of lectures with respect to the overlapping concepts previously implicit in Bourdieu's thought. Thinking in these terms, this book, in my opinion, is more about the recurrent theme of power, wherein Bourdieu uses the state as a case study to drive home his persistent critique of neo-liberalism and the modern techniques of statist control. Accordingly, the blurb emphasizes the central problematic Bourdieu addresses in the book: "How did [the state] come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life?" In his theorization of the state, Bourdieu acknowledgedly appropriates Max Weber's formulation of the state as the "monopoly of legitimate violence" (p. 4)...