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.

"Even our most basic rules and beliefs depend on whoever has the power to issue instructions".

Sir William Beveridge, the architect of the British welfare state, was a prominent eugenicist who believed in the pseudo-science of improving the genetic quality of the human population. His approach to social reform was deeply intertwined with early 20th-century eugenic theories.

Early Stances

Long before drafting the famous Beveridge Report, he argued in 1909 that state-supported workers deemed "unemployable" or defective should face a "complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood".

Work at the LSE

During his time as Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1919 to 1937, he was a member of the Eugenics Society and actively worked to create a Department of Social Biology to study genetics, population, and eugenics. He secured significant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to support these studies. 

The Welfare State & "Reform Eugenics"

By the time Beveridge drafted his landmark 1942 blueprint for the modern welfare state (the Beveridge Report), his views shifted from mainline class-based eugenics toward "reform eugenics". He utilized the language of eugenics to advocate for children's allowances and comprehensive welfare, arguing that alleviating poverty and squalor would naturally improve the genetic and physical health of the next generation. In 1943, he delivered the Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society, assuring his fellow eugenicists that his sweeping social proposals would achieve their goals of improving the population stock.

"If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it."

John Stuart Mill

Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.

John Bellers

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.

Arthur Young

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.

pamphlet

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

Patrick Colquhoun

[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.

Reverend Joseph Townsend

These quotes capture a raw, unfiltered ideological strain in late 17th–late 18th century British elite thought regarding labor, poverty, property, and social order. They come from the era of the Enclosure Movement, agricultural "improvement," early industrialization, and the transition from feudal/common rights to full private property and wage labor.

Core Argument They Share

• Common lands and modest independent means (a cow, geese, access to forest) make ordinary people too independent. This independence breeds "idleness," "insolence," and reduced willingness to submit to wage labor on someone else's terms.
• Poverty (specifically, lack of property forcing constant wage work) is not a bug but a necessary feature of civilized society. Without it, there is no disciplined labor force, no surplus for the rich, no "refinement."
• Hunger is the ideal, silent disciplinarian—better than overt violence because it's self-regulating and produces maximum exertion.

This is the logic of primitive accumulation: separating people from direct means of subsistence to turn them into a reliable proletariat.

Historical Context

These views were common among improving landlords, political arithmeticians, and moralists during the Enclosure Acts (especially 1750–1830, though earlier waves too). John Bellers (a Quaker) was actually somewhat heterodox and interested in reformatories/education, but the quote fits the broader critique of commons. Arthur Young, a famous agricultural writer, shifted somewhat later but long advocated enclosure. Patrick Colquhoun was a police magistrate and statistician obsessed with the "dangerous classes." Rev. Joseph Townsend was an Malthusian before Malthus, arguing against Poor Relief.

The pamphlet quote is classic "anti-cottager" literature—echoed in Board of Agriculture reports. The goal was clear: destroy the semi-independent peasant (who had use-rights, smallholdings, commons) to create a landless laborer who had to work when and where employers wanted, at the wages offered.

This mirrors Karl Marx's analysis in Capital (Vol. 1, Part 8) on "Bloody Legislation" and primitive accumulation—though one need not be a Marxist to recognize the historical pattern. Similar attitudes appear in colonial contexts (e.g., toward indigenous peoples with land access) and in later workhouses, the 1834 New Poor Law, and anti-vagrancy measures.

Evaluation

Empirically, there is some truth in the incentive problem: people with viable alternatives to grueling low-wage labor often choose them. Studies of basic income pilots, lottery winners, or welfare traps sometimes show reduced labor supply (though often modest, and confounded by bad program design). Subsistence peasants historically worked hard but on their own schedule—seasonal, self-directed, with more leisure than factory discipline allowed. "Indolence" is often a loaded term for "autonomy."

Morally and economically, the quotes are brutally instrumental. They treat humans as inputs to wealth production for others. They assume:

• The rich's "refinement" and "comfort" justify structural deprivation.
• Labor is naturally repulsive, so only destitution will compel it.
• Property for the many is incompatible with "civilization."

This zero-sum view of wealth was contested even then (Adam Smith was more nuanced: he supported high wages as beneficial to society and productivity; he criticized some enclosures). Later classical liberals and economists (e.g., Nassau Senior, Malthus) often echoed the disciplinary tone, while others saw rising wages and capital accumulation as expanding the pie.

Modern evidence challenges the necessity of extreme poverty:

• High-productivity economies (post-WWII West, East Asia) achieved growth with rising real wages, welfare states, and broad property ownership (homeownership, pensions, education).
• Human capital, technology, and institutions matter far more than bare hunger for sustained growth.
• Extreme precarity can produce short-term effort but also health breakdown, low skills, resentment, and lower long-run productivity.
• "Idleness" among the poor was often exaggerated; pre-industrial work patterns included intense seasonal labor followed by relative leisure.

These texts reveal the class psychology of the time: fear of the "mob," desire for social control, and a Protestant-work-ethic-inflected worldview that equated virtue with submission to market discipline. Similar rhetoric recurs today in debates over minimum wage, welfare, immigration, automation, and UBI—not always cynically, but often with the same underlying anxiety about maintaining labor supply and order.

The quotes are useful because they strip away later sentimentalism. They show how openly the creation of a dependent working class was discussed. Understanding this history helps clarify ongoing tensions between autonomy, dependency, productivity, and dignity.

These quotations are all part of a long-running 18th- and early 19th-century elite discourse that treats poverty as a tool of labor discipline rather than a social problem to be solved. They reflect a view, common among landlords, improvers, and political economists, that the poor should be kept dependent so they remain motivated to work.

What they express

John Bellers and Arthur Young argue that commons, small holdings, and subsistence resources reduce labor discipline because they give the poor some independence. The pamphlet quote about cows, hogs, and geese makes the same claim more bluntly: that even modest self-provisioning encourages “idleness” because it reduces reliance on wage labor.

Patrick Colquhoun goes further by presenting poverty itself as a necessary social condition, saying it is indispensable because it creates labor and, therefore, wealth. Joseph Townsend’s hunger argument is even harsher: he claims deprivation is a better and more efficient force than legal coercion because hunger supposedly compels obedience and work.

Historical meaning

Taken together, these passages show how poverty was often framed as an economic instrument in Britain’s transition to industrial capitalism. The logic was that workers needed to lack alternatives so they would accept wages, long hours, and low pay. This thinking is closely associated with enclosure, poor law debates, and the push to reorganize rural life around market labor.

Why they matter

These quotations are frequently cited because they expose the moral language behind early capitalist labor policy: “industry,” “improvement,” and “civilization” were often used to justify coercion and deprivation. In modern terms, they are evidence that some elites explicitly saw insecurity as productive, not accidental.

If you want, I can also identify the exact source text for each quote and give you a clean citation list.