Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron

Reproduction in education, society and culture.
Tr. By R. Nice. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. 1977 [1970]

Here are the four major propositions that are the core of Bourdieu's argumentation about the necessary relationship between cultural arbitrariness and the misrecognition that it requires to reproduce itself.

The developments on each of the propositions can be found by clicking on 'more'

(shorter quotes and annotations from Book I are also available.)

Book I -- FOUNDATIONS OF A THEORY OF SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

  1. ABOUT THE TWO FOLD ARBITRARINESS OF PEDAGOGIC ACTION

    All pedagogic action is,

    objectively,
    symbolic violence
    insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power.

    more

  2. ABOUT PEDAGOGIC AUTHORITY

    Insofar as it is a power of symbolic violence,

    exerted within a relation of pedagogic communication which can produce its own, specifically symbolic effect only because the arbitrary power which makes imposition possible is never seen in its full truth (in the sense of proposition 1.1);

    and insofar as it is the inculcation of a cultural arbitrary,

    carried on within a relation of pedagogic communication which can produce its own, specifically pedagogic effect only because the arbitrariness of the content inculcated is never seen in its full truth (in the sense of proposition 1.2) -

    PA necessarily implies, as a social condition of its exercise,

    1. pedagogic authority (PAu)
    2. and the relative autonomy of the agency commissioned to excercise it.
    more

  3. ABOUT PEDAGOGIC WORK

    Insofar as it is the arbitrary imposition of a cultural arbitrary

    presupposing PAu, i.e. a delegation of authority (by 1 and 2), which requires the pedagogic agency to reproduce the principles of the cultural arbitrary which a group or class imposes as worthy of reproduction both by its very existence and by the fact of delegating to an agency the authority needed in order to reproduce it (by 2.3 and 2.3.1),

    PA entails pedagogic work (PW),

    a process of inculcation
    which must last long enough to produce
    a durable training, i.e. a habitus,
    the product of internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary capable of perpetuating itself after PA has ceased and thereby of perpetuating in practices the principles of the internalized arbitrary.

    more
  4. ABOUT THE TEACHING SYSTEM

    Every institutionalized teaching system (ES) owes the specific characteristics of its structure and functioning to the fact that, by the means proper to the institution, it has to produce and reproduce the institutional conditions whose existence and persistence (self reproduction of the system) are necessary both

    • to the exercise of its essential function of inculcation and
    • to the fulfilment of its function of reproducing a cultural arbitrary
      which it does not produce (cultural reproduction), the reproduction of which contributes to the reproduction of the relations between the groups or classes (social reproduction).

    more