Iread with great interest Alex Callinicos’s critique of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu in NLR 236. It is a provocative essay whose ambition and logic epitomizes what is wrong, and what is right, with a certain kind of ‘Marxist’ critique. Most of what is wrong with it stems from its reductionism and stubborn refusal to interrogate canonical categories. Callinicos does not want to learn from his interlocutors, because he already knows the truth; so his essay is predictable—never an intellectual virtue. On the other hand, armed with his particular truth, Callinicos is incisive and relentless in a critique that rightly identifies the limits of his interlocutors’ arguments, but unfortunately stops short before his own.
Callinicos’s critique can be summarized as follows: Giddens is a Weberian social theorist who has lost his critical edge and become an ideologist of the Clinton/Blair Third Way. Bourdieu is an iconoclastic social theorist, in the mould of Durkheim, who has moved politically to the left, but remains trapped in a bourgeois discourse of the ‘universal intellectual’ and social democratic reform. Both theorists fall short of standard Marxist analysis of the contradictions of capitalism in the epoch of post-Fordism and flexible accumulation. Giddens attracts most hostility. The Third Way, ‘one of the worst books by a leading social theorist’, offers a complacent vision of globalization. Bourdieu is presented as the antithesis of Giddens, a crusader like Noam Chomsky who takes the depredations of capitalism seriously and struggles against them in a spirit of Sartrean engagement. But, alas, Bourdieu is limited by his failure to be a Marxist and thus, in good Hegelian fashion, needs to be aufgehoben. Giddens’s acceptance of the imperatives of capitalism, and Bourdieu’s spirited and well-meaning but merely social democratic opposition to them, find their resolution at a higher level in a vaguely defined Marxism. Indeed, by the end of Callinicos’s essay the apparent choice between these three alternatives is dialectically reduced to two, as Bourdieu’s ineffectual social democracy is compelled by the force of argument to opt between the others. The first path, writes Callinicos, is to ‘adapt to the existing order, seeking marginal improvements inflated by self-deceiving rhetoric. Such, essentially, is the course adopted by Giddens. Alternatively, one can seek to identify and to strengthen the forces capable of challenging the structures of capitalist domination. Bourdieu seems to be groping towards this second option. To do so effectively will require that he seriously engages with the revolutionary Marxist tradition.’ Despite the qualifications—what do ‘effectively’ and ‘seriously’ mean?—Callinicos leaves no doubt that Bourdieu can rise to the level of authentic critique only by embracing some of the central claims of revolutionary Marxism.