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, illusion, symbolic capital, and field. In this political economy, one enjoys 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.
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Political Economy of Being . . . and How to Analyze It 1
1. Social Efficiency and Social Complicity 20
2. Structure, Capacity, and Dispositionality 41
3. On the Production and Distribution of the Meaningful Life 62
4. The Means and Ends of Recognition 80
5. The Social Physics of Existential Mobility 92
Conclusion: Viability and the Politics of Existential Ecologies 113
Notes 133
Bibliography 149
Index 161
