Isabell Lorey: Core Concepts and Contributions

1. The Three Dimensions of the Precarious

Lorey’s foundational move is to distinguish three analytically separate but interlinked forms of the precarious. This is the conceptual architecture of her work.

a. Precariousness — the shared, existential condition

This is the universal vulnerability of embodied life. It is relational, social, and inherent to all living beings. Lorey draws directly on Judith Butler’s argument that precariousness is a socio‑ontological condition of “being‑with” others.

b. Precarity — the unequal distribution of insecurity

This is where vulnerability becomes stratified. Precarity is a category of order, a way societies hierarchize whose lives are protected and whose are exposed. It is tied to processes of Othering and naturalized domination.

c. Governmental Precarization — insecurity as a mode of rule

This is Lorey’s most original contribution. In neoliberal societies, insecurity is normalized and used as a technique of governing. Precarization becomes a regulatory strategy, not an exception.

This triad allows Lorey to show how vulnerability becomes political, how inequality is produced, and how insecurity becomes a tool of governance.

2. Precarity as a Neoliberal Mode of Government

Lorey argues that contemporary neoliberalism governs not through stability but through managed insecurity. Precarity is no longer a deviation from the norm of security; it is the norm.

This is what she calls “governing through insecurity.” Precarization becomes a technique of steering populations by making them self‑regulate, self‑optimize, and internalize risk.

This aligns her with Foucault’s concept of governmentality, but she extends it by showing how affective and existential vulnerability are mobilized politically.

3. Critique of Welfare-State Immunization

Lorey critiques the older welfare-state model for treating precarity as a threat to be immunized against. Drawing on Robert Castel, she shows how the welfare state constructed a binary between:

• the secure, protected citizen

• the insecure, threatening precarious subject

But she argues this binary is no longer operative: in post‑Fordist societies, security and insecurity overlap, and the “immune” and the “precarious” become indistinguishable.

This is her concept of biopolitical immunization—a modern dynamic that legitimizes domination by selectively protecting some while exposing others.

4. Precarity as a Site of Resistance

Lorey is not fatalistic. She argues that precarity can be repoliticized and turned into a basis for collective action.

She highlights feminist and activist movements—especially Precarias a la Deriva—as examples of how precarious subjects invent new forms of care, solidarity, and disobedience.

This is her radical proposition: precarity can be a condition of political mobilization rather than only a condition of domination.

5. Relation to Butler, Foucault, and Post-Fordism

Lorey’s work sits at the intersection of:

• Butler’s ontology of vulnerability

• Foucault’s governmentality

• post‑Fordist analyses of labor, flexibility, and insecurity

Her contribution is to show how these strands converge in a political economy where insecurity is both produced and normalized.

6. Why Lorey Matters

Lorey provides a vocabulary for understanding:

• gig‑economy labor

• migration regimes

• austerity politics

• the erosion of welfare states

• the emotional and affective dimensions of neoliberal governance

Her framework is powerful because it explains not just who is precarious, but how precarity is produced, distributed, and governed.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean” is the most famous line from Raymond Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder.

In modern English, it means:

In a corrupt, dangerous, and morally compromised world, a truly good person must be able to move through it without becoming corrupt himself.

A few nuances make the line powerful:

• “Mean streets” doesn't just mean poor neighborhoods. It means streets filled with crime, violence, greed, and moral decay.
• “A man must go” suggests necessity. The hero cannot avoid the world’s ugliness; he has to face it.
• “Who is not himself mean” means he remains honorable, decent, and incorruptible despite what surrounds him.

Chandler was describing the ideal detective in hard-boiled fiction: someone who sees the worst of humanity every day yet refuses to become cynical, cruel, or dishonest.

The sentence is often quoted more broadly as a statement about character:

Real integrity is not staying good because life is easy; it is staying good while moving through a difficult and compromised world.

can you interpret the line through philosophical lenses

Yes. Chandler's line is remarkably rich philosophically because it poses a central ethical problem: How can one remain good in a bad world?

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean."

Different philosophical traditions answer that question in different ways.

Virtue Ethics (Aristotle)

An Aristotelian would focus on character rather than rules or consequences.

The important fact is not that the streets are mean, but that the man has cultivated virtues—courage, justice, temperance, wisdom. The test of virtue is precisely whether it survives contact with corruption.

For Aristotle, a virtuous person is not someone sheltered from vice but someone who can encounter it without being transformed by it.

The line becomes:

The good person proves his virtue by remaining excellent amid moral decay.

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Stoicism

The Stoics would see the "mean streets" as external circumstances beyond one's control.

What matters is not the world but one's own moral state. The streets can be violent, unjust, and chaotic; none of that can damage a person's virtue unless he consents to it.

Epictetus might say:

You cannot control the streets, only whether you become mean yourself.

The line therefore expresses the Stoic distinction between external events and inner character.

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Kantian Ethics

For Immanuel Kant, morality comes from acting according to duty rather than inclination or expediency.

The man goes through the streets knowing that dishonesty, cruelty, and corruption might make life easier. Yet he refuses.

The moral worth of his actions lies precisely in resisting those temptations.

A Kantian reading is:

The truly moral person acts rightly even when surrounded by incentives to do otherwise.

---

Existentialism

An existentialist reading is darker.

For thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, there is no cosmic guarantee that goodness will prevail. The streets are mean because the world is indifferent.

The man must choose who he will be.

His refusal to become mean is an act of self-creation.

The line becomes:

In a world without inherent moral order, integrity is the continual choice not to become what surrounds you.

---

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche would probably admire the strength in the sentence but question its moral assumptions.

He might ask:

• Is the man genuinely noble?
• Or is he merely obeying conventional morality?

Nietzsche's concern is that one might preserve innocence out of weakness rather than strength.

A Nietzschean version would be:

Can you pass through corruption and remain yourself—not because you are protected from it, but because you are stronger than it?

This shifts the emphasis from goodness to self-mastery.

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Christian Ethics

A Christian reading sees the line as a description of holiness in a fallen world.

The challenge is not withdrawal from society but remaining spiritually intact within it.

It echoes the biblical ideal of being "in the world but not of it."

The streets are fallen humanity; the man's task is faithfulness.

The line becomes:

Walk among sinners without becoming one yourself.

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Political Philosophy

The line can also be read as a statement about institutions.

A police officer, judge, journalist, or politician works within systems that are often compromised. The challenge is remaining honorable while exercising power.

In this reading, Chandler's detective becomes a symbol of civic virtue.

The question is:

How does one participate in flawed institutions without being morally absorbed by them?

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A Tragic Reading

Perhaps the deepest interpretation is that Chandler is describing not triumph but perpetual struggle.

The sentence does not say:

A good man lives on good streets.

It says:

A good man must go down mean streets.

Corruption is not an exception to human life; it is part of the terrain. Moral life is therefore not a matter of escaping evil but encountering it without surrendering to it.

This is why the line endures. It expresses a tension that runs through much of moral philosophy—from Aristotle to the Stoics to existentialism:

Character is not formed away from the world. It is formed by moving through the world and deciding, again and again, what one will not become.

Several philosophical traditions—or at least strands within them—could agree with the claim that a society can become so corrupt that it ought to be allowed to collapse. However, they would agree for different reasons.

Revolutionary Marxism

Some revolutionary thinkers argued that existing social orders are not reformable because the institutions themselves reproduce oppression.

For figures like Karl Marx, the issue is not individual wickedness but structural conditions. If Gotham's corruption is built into its economic and political foundations, then preserving Gotham merely preserves injustice.

In its strongest form, the argument is:

A rotten system should not be saved; it should be replaced.

The goal is not destruction for its own sake but the birth of a new social order.

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Certain Forms of Anarchism

Some anarchists would see Gotham's corruption as evidence that centralized institutions—police, courts, political elites—have fundamentally failed.

If the structures themselves generate domination and violence, then their collapse may be viewed as desirable.

The key distinction is that many anarchists would not want Gotham annihilated; they would want its power structures dismantled.

The target is the system, not necessarily the people living within it.

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Nietzschean Radical Critique

Nietzsche sometimes praised the destruction of decadent forms of life.

If Gotham represents a civilization sustained only by habit, fear, and moral exhaustion, then its collapse could be interpreted as a necessary clearing away of decadence.

However, Nietzsche would likely ask:

Is Gotham dying because it deserves to die, or because stronger possibilities are emerging?

He is generally more interested in what is created than in what is destroyed.

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Historical Cyclical Theories

Thinkers such as Oswald Spengler argued that civilizations have life cycles.

In this view, some societies genuinely enter terminal decline. Attempts to save them are futile because they are undergoing a historical process larger than any individual.

The line becomes:

Gotham is not failing; it has reached the end of its natural life.

This isn't so much a moral judgment as a historical one.

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Deep Ecology and Anti-Civilization Thought

Some radical environmental philosophies view large-scale industrial civilization as fundamentally destructive.

Applied metaphorically, Gotham might represent a form of social organization whose continued existence causes more harm than good.

From this perspective, collapse can be viewed as a precondition for healthier forms of life.

Again, the emphasis is often on dismantling systems rather than destroying people.

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The Most Direct Philosophical Agreement: Political Realism Taken to Extremes

A very hard-edged realist could argue that political entities derive legitimacy from their ability to maintain order and justice.

When a state or city can no longer perform those functions, it loses its claim to continued existence.

The logic is:

If Gotham cannot protect its citizens, enforce law, or sustain civic life, then Gotham as a political order has already failed.

Historically, many states and cities have disappeared without philosophers treating that disappearance as tragic in itself.

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The Strongest Philosophical Objection

Most ethical traditions push back against the line because it conflates a society with the people living in it.

A city may be corrupt. But does that mean millions of individuals deserve the consequences of its destruction?

This is where traditions as different as Christianity, liberalism, existentialism, and virtue ethics often converge. They tend to resist writing off entire communities because they continue to locate moral worth in persons rather than systems.

So the philosophies most sympathetic to "Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die" are usually those that prioritize historical forces, structures, civilizations, or systems over individual lives. Philosophies centered on individual dignity generally reject the conclusion, even when they agree that Gotham is profoundly corrupt. The debate ultimately turns on a deeper question:

When a social order becomes rotten, should our loyalty belong to the order itself—or to the people trapped inside it?

 

"I think there were people fighting this same helpless fight on both sides. The guards who tried to be better and the prisoners who suffered the most".

 

• If every vulnerable, poor, neglected, or suffering person bears something sacred, then harming them is, in a spiritual sense, harming God.
• A society that exploits, ignores, dehumanizes, or destroys people is therefore acting against the divine image present in them.
• In that framework, "God killing" is not literally killing God, but participating in actions that deny human dignity, compassion, or sacred worth.

Fyodor Dostoevsky explored the idea that cruelty toward others is also a rejection of the divine. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that injustice against human beings is a moral and spiritual offense against God's creation.

 

Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa

Claire Birkenshaw

“In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”

(William Blake, 1794).  

Sociology’s purpose, Bourdieu (2013, p.10) argued, is to “uncover the social unconscious” in order to examine and explain “the social relations of domination”, which “deny others the full expression of their intellectual potentialities.” To aid our sociological endeavours, Bourdieu offers a “set of relational concepts whose application [can be utilised] to understand, explain and disclose inequalities at different layers of society” through a “theory-method” process (Costa and Murphy, 2015, p.3). In other words, Bourdieu gifted us with a range of concepts or tools, such as field, habitus, doxa, capital, illusio and symbolic violence, to think with so that we undergo a metanoia – “a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s whole vision of the social world” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.251) – in order to apply a “new gaze” (ibid.), [a] “sociological eye” (ibid.), to expose the realities of existence to power.

In conversation with Terry Eagleton, renowned French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, disclosed that he tended to avoid use of the word ‘ideology’ because “it has very often been misused, or used in a very vague manner” (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p.111); adding further that its employment “seems to convey a sort of discredit” (ibid.). In effect, the deployment of ‘ideology’ or ‘ideological’ by those with power acts as another “instrument of symbolic domination” (ibid., pp.111-112). Instead, for sociological thinking and analysis, Bourdieu considers “the notion of doxa [to be] more useful” (ibid., p.113, my emphasis).

To aid our understanding of doxa, Australian sociologist, Steven Threadgold, offers this richer definition rather than its simpler, rules of the game, form: “a core set of common sense norms, values and knowledge, which tend to be viewed as natural and necessary, that are intrinsic to a specific field” (Threadgold, 2018, p.47). Furthermore, Threadgold (ibid.) guides our sociological thinking to recognise that contemporary doxa “carries the weight of history” and has, at points in the past, endured “political contestation” (ibid.), much of which is “usually forgotten” (ibid.); thus, hidden and silent. Hence, doxa sets, and internalises, our “sense of limits” (Deer, 2012, p.115). As a result, existing forms of doxic knowledge and attitudes are “taken for granted” (Bourdieu, [1997] 2005, p.166) because they appear to be “self-evident” (ibid., p. 164), natural and legitimate. Therefore, doxa’s arbitrary power asymmetry is unquestioned, accepted, and adhered to. For example, this may reveal itself in strict gender division for exam subjects – boys select physics, girls select biology – even though students have been given the freedom to choose, something which school leaders may not be able to account for and address, without sociological understanding of doxa.  

Heterodoxy, on the other hand, materialises when there is recognition “of the possibility of competing beliefs” (Deer, 2012, p.118), which exposes “the arbitrariness of the taken for granted” (Bourdieu [1977] 2005, p.169) to the dominated classes. It is in the interests of the dominated classes to push “back the limits of doxa”, argues Bourdieu (ibid.), otherwise domination will take “the form of a more effective […], more brutal, means of oppression” (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p.115), not perceived as violence as such, because it is “soft [and] invisible” (ibid.): in other words symbolic violence, described by Threadgold (2020, p.103) as “an affective violence [delivering] emotional cuts and bruises.” If symbolic violence is sustained for long periods of time it may lead to “self-exclusion or social exclusion, or forms of social death” to people affected by it. This suggests there is an affective dimension to doxa, feeling the “weight of the water” as Bourdieu and Wacquant term it (1992, p.127).  

Deer (2012, p.119), however, alerts us to the fact that heterodoxy’s power to challenge is ultimately restrained because it is “essentially mediated by the ruling doxa.” In cases where heterodoxy does trouble doxa significantly, for example when ‘equality’ appears to be close to achievement, power may seek to straighten opinion with orthodoxy to restore “the primal state of innocence of doxa” (Bourdieu, [1977] 2005, p.169). This is exampled by the current anxiety-fused political rhetoric concerning issues relating to ‘race’ and LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools, which has resulted in hastily tempered legislation whose purpose appears to be the purging of ‘inappropriateness’ from contemporary education doxa with an intent to time-machine schools back to the epoch of prejudice and discrimination, unquestioning and “complicitous silence” (Bourdieu, [1977] 2005, p.188), and where children and adults alike have a “sense of one’s place” (Bourdieu, 2022, p.49). While reconfiguring education doxa to a state of ‘pre-inclusion’ may appeal to a range of ‘semi-expert’, such a politicians and journalists, or “doxosophers” as Bourdieu ( 2000, p.59) terms them, Bourdieu (2022, p.49) cautions that this may result in student “avoidance”, or “radical” self-exclusion, from education: “This educational establishment is not for the likes of me.” Perhaps, this explains why, like William Blake, I can hear the thoughtless thought-smithies hard at work with their production of “mind-forg’d manacles” too.  

References

Blake, W. ([1794] 2019) Songs of Innocence and Experience. London: Tate. 

Bourdieu, P. ([1977] 2005) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated from the French by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Translated from the French by R.Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2013) In Praise of Sociology: Acceptance Speech for the Gold Medal of the CNRS. Sociology, 47(1) pp.7-14.

Bourdieu, P. (2022) Principles of Vision: General Sociology, Volume 4. Translated from the French by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. and Eagleton, T. (1992) In Conversation: Doxa and Common Life.  New Left Review, 191, January / February, pp. 111-121.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant L. J. D. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deer, C. (2012) Doxa. In: Grenfell, M. ed. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. 2^nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. pp.114-125.

Murphy, M. and Costa, C. (2015) Bourdieu and the Application of Habitus across the Social Sciences. In: Murphy, M. and Costa, C. eds. Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research: The Art of Application. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.3-20.

Threadgold, S. (2018) Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles. Abingdon: Routledge.

Threadgold, S. (2020) Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Suggested citation

Birkenshaw, C. (2023) Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa. Altered States of Academia, 21 December [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2023/12/21/thinking-with-bourdieu-doxa/&gt; [Accessed ?].

John Dewey did not view knowledge primarily as a commodity possessed by isolated individuals. He tended to see inquiry as a cooperative activity emerging from communities confronting shared problems. In that sense, knowledge behaves very differently from material goods.

If I give you an apple, I no longer have the apple.

If I share an idea, a method, or a discovery, I still possess it.

In fact, the knowledge may become more valuable as more people participate in testing, criticizing, refining, and extending it.

That's one reason philosophers, educators, and commons theorists often distinguish between:

• Rival goods (food, land, physical objects)
• Non-rival goods (knowledge, language, mathematics, scientific discoveries)

Knowledge is unusual because its use by one person does not necessarily diminish its use by another.

Your observation about people is related.

Many economic models begin from isolated individuals making choices. Dewey begins from association. Human beings become intelligent not merely by possessing information but by participating in social inquiry.

A community of inquiry is not simply:

Many individuals with knowledge.

It is:

Many individuals creating knowledge together.

That changes the entire framing.

The central question becomes less:

How do we allocate scarce knowledge?

and more:

How do we organize institutions that allow inquiry, learning, and communication to flourish?

Dewey was deeply interested in education, democracy, journalism, and public deliberation. He believed intelligence was distributed across society rather than concentrated in a few experts or leaders.

The production of knowledge often accelerates when it is shared openly.

The internet, open-source software, scientific collaboration, and public libraries all illustrate this dynamic. The more participants you have, the larger the potential community of inquiry becomes.

In that sense, a community of inquiry is almost the opposite of the image of society implied by a strict rational-choice framework. Instead of autonomous utility maximizers exchanging scarce goods, you have people jointly investigating problems, revising beliefs, and creating new possibilities that did not previously exist.

The scarcity framework asks:

How should we divide what we already have?

The Deweyan framework often asks:

How can collective inquiry create something new?

Economists sometimes move too quickly from:

"People choose X"

to

"People therefore wanted X."

Those are not equivalent statements.

Someone may choose the least harmful option among terrible alternatives.

1. Institutions create constraints.
2. People adapt rationally to those constraints.
3. The adaptation is cited as evidence that the constraints are acceptable.

That third step does not logically follow from the first two.

The individual is addressed as sovereign and autonomous when responsibility is assigned:

Choose.

Invest in yourself.

Be entrepreneurial.

But collective claims are often met with institutional language:

The budget is constrained.

Markets require flexibility.

There is no alternative.

Whether one agrees with the diagnosis, the tension is real:

• Agency is individualized.
• Constraints are collectivized.
• Responsibility is personalized.
• Power is depersonalized.

The debate is usually not whether scarcity exists, but:

• Which scarcities are natural?
• Which are socially produced?
• Which are politically maintained?
• How should scarce resources be allocated?

That distinction matters because if all scarcity is treated as political, material limits can disappear from analysis. But if all scarcity is treated as natural, power relations disappear from analysis.

The most productive critiques tend to examine the interaction between both.

Rational Choice Theory analyzes how individuals navigate constraints. Neoliberal political discourse often treats those constrained choices as evidence of freedom. When the constraints themselves are politically constructed, this can transform structural problems into stories of individual responsibility, making deprivation appear as the outcome of personal decisions rather than institutional arrangements.