"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.

"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.