| This dissertation sets out to theoretically develop and critically elaborate upon sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's provisionally-formulated concept of “economic fatalism”—in part, by bringing the particular matrix of concerns encapsulated by this concept into a more productive and extended dialogue with intellectual resources drawn from critical traditions of socialist thought.; The operative assumption here is that the notion of “economic fatalism” as initially articulated by Bourdieu provides a cogent access point into some important features of neoliberal hegemony in the advanced capitalist world, offering a unique means of dissecting a number of prevailing assumptions about the “inevitability” of capitalist globalization and its associated menu of market-driven reforms. Moreover, as this dissertation argues at length, this notion also offers a highly suggestive window onto a bundle of broader theoretical and historical questions which Bourdieu himself largely foregoes explicitly addressing—the institutionalized separation of the economic and the political under capitalism and the limits this imposes upon the domain of popular sovereignty; the forms of individual and collective unfreedom encoded with liberal ideology and economic liberalism in particular; the nature and limits of liberal democracy as a system of popular self-rule; the complex range of social and ideological processes through which hegemony is constituted and popular consent is expressed within the quotidian pressures and constraints of specific socio-historical environments.; For all of Bourdieu's strenuous efforts to distance himself from a long-interred version of mechanistic Marxism, this dissertation concludes, his otherwise stimulating analysis of the increasing subordination of democratic political life to capitalist economic imperatives carries him directly onto the terrain of long-familiar debates on socialist theory and strategy. Indeed, as both Bourdieu and the broader “anti-globalization” movement of which he has been an active part need to strategically acknowledge, the “fatalistic” and pessimistic quality of contemporary political life invariably returns our attention to the central object of concern for “critical” socialist thought: the historical specificity of capitalism and of the peculiar limits which its concentrated form of private economic power imposes upon both the effective exercise of popular democracy and the free expression of individual needs and capacities. |
