Bordieu: What Makes a Social Class?: On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups

One of the main obstacles to scientific sociology is the use we make of common oppositions, paired concepts, or what Bachelard calls epistemological couples: constructed by social reality, these are unthinkingly used to construct social reality. One of these fundamental antinomies is the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism or, in more current parlance, between structuralism and constructivism, which can be roughly characterized as follows. From the objectivist point of view, social agents can be treated as things, as in the old Durkheimian precept, that is, classified like objects: access to the objective classification presupposes here a break with naive subjective classifications, which are seen as prenotions or ideologies. From the subjectivist point of view, as represented by phenomenology, ethnomethodology and constructivist sociology, agents construct social reality, which is itself understood as the product of the aggregation of these individual acts of construction. For this sort of sociological marginalism, there is no need to break with primary social experience, for the task of sociology is to give an