Structure, cause, and conflict: *Class theory and class analysis in Bourdieu

Despite the burgeoning secondary literature on Bourdieu, his sociology still provokes both open confusion and opposing, contradictory assessments. Much of the misunderstanding surrounding this sociology, I argue, is directly or indirectly related to its utilization of the concept of class. I therefore seek to reconstruct this concept in detail, especially as it pertains to Distinction and subsequent work. In large part, this entails untangling a set of meta-theoretic, epistemic, and substantive issues which are densely interwoven, and which often imply non-obvious departures from the canons of existing class theory and research. After sketching the landscape of contemporary class theory, I undertake an analysis of Bourdieu which hinges on four closely interrelated questions: his conceptualization of a class structure; the unusual causal efficacy that he attributes to this structure; the explanatory program which follows from such an attribution; and the consequences of the conditional autonomy which he nevertheless grants to the practices constitutive of class formations. Only when these issues have been clarified can we plausibly relate Bourdieu's approach to more familiar traditions of class and stratification theory. Moreover, only clarification of them will enable us to account for the most incongruous aspects of this approach---including the prominent role that it confers upon occupational categories, and more importantly, the vexing function fulfilled by the so-called "secondary properties" (e.g. gender) within it.;Once this has been accomplished, it becomes possible to evaluate the most contentious aspect of Bourdieu's class analysis: the assertion of the universality of class qua sociological explanans. There are good reasons, I argue, to regard this claim as implausible. Such an assessment finds confirmation in the recent writings by Bourdieu on gender and by Wacquant on race, which carry an implicit critique of certain aspects of the class analytic approach. However, once the implications of this critique have been appreciated, we will be able to discern the outlines of a form of class analysis that is less encompassing, but nevertheless retains the key insight of Bourdieu's earlier work---namely, its focus on symbolic systems of classification, understood as the vehicle of an often-latent class conflict.