Symbolische Gewalt

This volume of “Staatsverständnisse” examines Bourdieu’s contribution to political thinking. Although Pierre Bourdieu has long been recognised as the modern authority on sociology and societal theory, his significance in terms of political theory and political science has hardly been acknowledged. In his eyes, the question of the state and politics is directly related to that of symbolic violence (and, by extension, is also related to the question of the political value of political science, which can no longer be regarded as investigative but combative), which, according to Bourdieu, the state has a monopoly on. This means that the real political struggle is one for hegemony or, as Bourdieu puts it, the struggle to develop a legitimate standpoint on the social sphere, that is “the legitimation of the social order as it exists”.
Bourdieu conceptualises the state by combining the notion that the state enjoys a monopoly on legitimate symbolic violence with Max Weber’s idea that the state has a monopoly on legitimate physical violence.

With contributions by
Klaus Dörre, Michael Hirsch, Stephan Lessenich, Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Marion Löffler, Jens Kastner, Philipp Rhein, Margareta Steinrücke, Rüdiger Voigt and Loïc Wacquant.