A reasoned utopia and economic fatalism (Pierre Bourdieu)

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Pierre Bourdieu

A Reasoned Utopia and
Economic Fatalism
To the town of Ludwigshafen, its mayor, Mr Wolfgang Schulte, and the
Ernst Bloch Institute, my warmest thanks for the honour I have been
awarded, which associates my own name with that of one of the German
philosophers whom I most admire.1 My thanks also to Mr Ulrich Beck
for the very generous address he has just given. He leads me to think that
we may, in the near future, see the utopia of a European intellectual collective, which I have long advocated, brought into being. My only criticism of this eulogy is that it is really too generous, especially in the way
it attributed to my individual personality alone a number of properties
or qualities which are also the product of social conditions.
I cannot help feeling that in being so honoured, in being brought into
the orbit of a great defender of utopianism—these days so often discredited, dismissed and ridiculed in the name of economic realism—I am
being authorized, indeed urged, to try to define what the intellectual’s
role can and should be in relation to utopia in general and European
utopia in particular.
Let us acknowledge the fact that we are currently in a period of neo-conservative reconstruction. But this conservative revolution is taking an
unprecedented form: there is no attempt, as there was in earlier times,
to invoke an idealized past through the exaltation of earth and blood,
the archaic themes of ancient agrarian mythologies. It is a new type of
conservative revolution that claims connection with progress, reason
and science—economics actually—to justify its own re-establishment,
and by the same token tries to relegate progressive thought and action
to archaic status. It erects into defining standards for all practices, and
thus into ideal rules, the regularities of the economic world abandoned
to its own logic: the law of the market, the law of the strongest. It ratifies and glorifies the rule of what we call the financial markets, a return
to a sort of radical capitalism answering to no law except that of maximum profit; an undisguised, unrestrained capitalism, but one that has
been rationalized, tuned to the limit of its economic efficiency through
the introduction of modern forms of domination (‘management’) and

manipulative techniques like market research, marketing and commercial advertising.
1

This is the text of Pierre Bourdieu’s speech of acceptance of the Ernst-Bloch Preis der
Stadt Ludwigshafen, 22 November 1997.
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The misleading aspect of this conservative revolution is that it retains
nothing, apparently, of the murky pastoral Black Forest beloved of the
conservative revolutionaries of the 1930s; it is trapped out with all the
signs of modernity. After all, it comes from Chicago, doesn’t it? Galileo
said that the natural world is written in mathematical language. Now
people are trying to make out that the social world is written in economic language . . . It is through the weapon of mathematics—and also
that of media power—that neoliberalism has become the supreme form
of the conservative counterattack, looming for the last thirty years under
the name of ‘the end of ideology’ or, more recently, ‘the end of history’.
What is presented to us as an uncrossable horizon of thought—the end
of critical utopias—is really none other than an economistic fatalism which
can be criticized in the terms used by Ernst Bloch in Geist der Utopie
when addressing such economism and fatalism as there is to be found in
Marxism: ‘The same man—Marx—who stripped production of all its
fetishized characteristics, who believed he could analyze and exorcize all
the irrationalities of history as being simply obscurities due to the class
situation or the production process, obscurities which had not been seen
or understood and whose influence therefore seemed inevitable; the same
man who exiled from history all dreams, all active utopias, every “telos”
recalling the religious, behaves towards the “productive forces”, the calculus of the “process of production”, in the same over-constitutive manner, finding the same pantheism, the same mysticism, and claiming for
them the same ultimate determining force that Hegel had claimed for
the “idea” and Schopenhauer for his alogical “will”.’2

This fetishization of the productive forces resulting in fatalism is to be
found today, paradoxically, in the prophets of neoliberalism and the high
priests of the Deutschmark and monetary stability. Neoliberalism is a
powerful economic theory whose strictly symbolic strength, combined with the
effect of theory, redoubles the force of the economic realities it is supposed to express.
It ratifies the spontaneous philosophy of the people who run large multinationals and of the agents of high finance—in particular pension-fund
managers. Relayed throughout the world by national and international
politicians, civil servants, and most of all the universe of senior journalists—all more or less equally ignorant of the underlying mathematical
theology—it is becoming a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical
gospel. This gospel, or rather the soft vulgate which is put forward
everywhere under the name of liberalism, is concocted out of a collection
of ill-defined words—‘globalization’, ‘flexibility’, ‘deregulation’ and so
on—which, through their liberal or even libertarian connotations, may
help give the appearance of a message of freedom and liberation to a conservative ideology which thinks itself opposed to all ideology.
In fact, this philosophy knows and recognizes no purpose but the everincreasing creation of wealth and, more secretly, its concentration in the
hands of a small privileged minority; and it therefore leads to a combat by
every means, including the destruction of the environment and human
sacrifice, against any obstacle to the maximization of profit. Supporters
of laisser-faire, like Thatcher, Reagan and their successors, are careful in
2

Ernst Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie [1923], Paris 1977, vol. i, p. 290.

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practice not to ‘laisser faire’ but, on the contrary, to leave a free hand to
the logic of financial markets by waging total war on trade unions, on the
social achievements of the last couple of centuries, in a word against all
the forms of civilization associated with the social state.

Neoliberal policy can now be judged by its results, which are clear for all
to see, despite systematic efforts to prove, through statistical sleight of
hand and gross trickery, that the United States or Britain has achieved
full employment. There is mass unemployment; what jobs there are have
become precarious, the resulting permanent insecurity affecting an
increasing proportion of the population, even in the middle classes; there
is profound demoralization linked to the collapse of elementary solidarities, especially in the family, and all the consequences of this state of
anomie: juvenile delinquency, crime, drugs, alcoholism, the reappearance in France and elsewhere of fascist-style political movements; and
there is a gradual destruction of social achievements, any defence of
which is denounced as old-fashioned conservatism. To this we may now
add the destruction of the economic and social foundations of humanity’s
rarest cultural achievements. The autonomy enjoyed by the universes of
cultural production in relation to the market, which had increased continuously through the struggles of writers, artists and scientists, is under
increasing threat. The dominion of ‘commerce’ and ‘the commercial’
increases daily over literature, notably through concentration in the publishing industry which is increasingly subjected to the constraints of
immediate profit; over cinema—we may wonder what will remain, in
ten years’ time, of a European experimental art cinema—unless something is done to give avant-garde producers the means of production
and, perhaps more importantly, distribution. All this, without mentioning the social services, doomed either to submit to the directly interested
orders of state or business bureaucracies or to be economically strangled.
What, I will be asked, is the role of intellectuals in all this? I make no
attempt to list—it would take too long and be too cruel—all the forms of
default or, worse still, collaboration. I need only mention the arguments
of so-called modern and postmodern philosophers who, when not content
with leaving well alone and burying themselves in scholastic games,
restrict themselves to verbal defence of reason and rational dialogue or,
worse still, suggest an allegedly postmodern but actually radical-chic version of the ideology of the end of ideologies, complete with the condemnation of the grand narratives and a nihilistic denunciation of science.
How, in this somewhat discouraging environment, are we to avoid
becoming demoralized? How are we to restore life, and social strength,
to the ‘considered utopianism’ of which Ernst Bloch speaks in reference
to Francis Bacon?3 For a start, what should this phrase be taken to mean?

Giving a rigorous meaning to the opposition drawn by Marx between
‘sociologism’ (pure and simple submission to social laws) and ‘utopianism’ (the adventurous challenging of these laws) Ernst Bloch describes
the ‘considered utopian’ as one who acts ‘by virtue of his fully aware foreknowledge of the objective trend’, the objective, and real, possibility of his
‘epoch’; one who, in other words, ‘anticipates psychologically a possible
3

Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie, vol. 1, 176.
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reality’. Rational utopianism is defined as being both against ‘pure wishful thinking (which) has always brought discredit on utopia’ and against
‘philistine platitudes concerned essentially with facts’; it is opposed to
‘the—ultimately defeatist—heresy of an objectivist automatism according
to which the world’s objective contradictions would be sufficient in
themselves to revolutionize the world in which they occur’ and at the
same time to ‘activism for its own sake’, pure voluntarism based on an
excess of optimism.4
So against this bankers’ fatalism, that wants us to believe the world cannot
be any different from the way it is—wholly amenable, in other words, to
the interests and wishes of bankers—intellectuals, and all others who
really care about the good of humanity, should re-establish a utopian
thought with scientific backing, both in its aims, which should be compatible with objective trends, and in its means which also have to be scientifically tested. They need to work collectively on analyses able to launch
realistic projects and actions closely matched to the objective processes of
the order they are meant to transform.
Reasoned utopianism, as I have defined it here, is undoubtedly what is
most lacking in Europe today. The way to resist this Europe—the one
that bankers’ thought is trying to railroad us into accepting—is not to
reject Europe itself from a nationalist position, as some do, but to mount
a progressive rejection of the neoliberal Europe defined by banks and
bankers. Of course, it is in their interests to make out that any rejection

of the Europe they favour is tantamount to rejecting Europe in any form.
But in rejecting a Europe defined and dominated solely by the banks we
will be rejecting banker’s thought, a process that—under neoliberal
cover—ends by making money the gauge of all things, even the value of
men and women in the labour market, and so on from one thing to the
next through all the dimensions of existence; a process that, by setting
profit as the sole criterion for evaluating education, culture, art and literature, condemns us to a flat philistine civilization of fast food, airport
novels and TV soaps.
Resistance to the bankers’ Europe—and the conservative restoration it
promises—can only be European. And it can only be really European, in
the sense of freed from interests, assumptions, prejudices and habits of
thought that are national and still vaguely nationalist, if it is the deed of
all Europeans, in other words a concerted combination of intellectuals
from all the European countries, of trade unions from all the European
countries, of the most diverse associations from all the European countries. This is why the most urgent task at the moment is not the composition of common European programmes, but the creation of
institutions—parliaments, international federations, European associations of this or that: truckers, publishers, teachers, and so forth, but also
defenders of trees, fish, mushrooms, pure air, children and all the rest—
within which some common European programmes can be discussed and
elaborated. People will say that all this exists already, but in fact I am
quite certain of the contrary—there is no need to look any further than
the present state of the European federation of trade unions; the only
4

Ibid., pp. 180, 178.

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European international body really under construction and possessing
some level of effectiveness is that of the technocrats, against which I have

nothing whatsoever to say, indeed I would be the first to defend it
against the simplistic and usually stupidly nationalist or—worse still—
populist doubts being cast on it.
Lastly, to avoid having to give a general and abstract answer to the question I began by asking—concerning the possible role of intellectuals in
constructing the European utopia—I would like to say what contribution I personally hope to make to this immense and urgent task.
Convinced that the most yawning gaps in European construction are in
four main areas—the social state and its functions; unification of the
trade unions; harmonization and modernization of the education systems; articulation between economic policy and social policy—I am currently working, in collaboration with researchers from different
European countries, on the conception and fabrication of the organizational structures essential for carrying out the comparable and complementary research that is needed to give utopianism in these matters its
reasoned character, especially, for example, throwing light on the social
obstacles to a real Europeanization of institutions like the state, the educational system and the unions.
The fourth project, which is particularly dear to my heart, is concerned
with the articulation of economic policy and what we call social policy,
more precisely the social effects and costs of economic policy. It involves
trying to track down the primary causes of the different forms of social
misery that afflict men and women in European societies; and this nearly
always takes us back to economic decisions. It is an opportunity for the
sociologist, who is not normally called in, except to mend crockery broken by economists, to remind us that sociology could and should play an
initial part in political decisions which are increasingly left to the economists or dictated by economic considerations of the narrowest sort.
Through detailed description of the suffering caused by neoliberal policies—along the lines of the descriptions in La Misère du monde5—and
through a systematic cross-referencing of, on the one hand, economic
indices concerned with the social policy of businesses (redundancies, management methods, salaries and so on) as well as its economic results
(profits, productivity and so on) with, on the other hand, indices of a more
obviously social type (industrial accidents, occupational diseases, alcoholism, drug use, suicide, delinquency, crime, rape, and so on), I would
like to raise the question of the social costs of economic violence; and thus try
to lay foundations for an economics of well-being that would take into
account all those things that the people who run the economy, and economists, leave out of the more or less fanciful calculations in whose name
they purport to govern us.
In conclusion, therefore, I need only formulate the question which ought
to be at the centre of any reasoned utopia concerning Europe: how do we

create a really European Europe, one that is free from all dependence on any
of the imperialisms—starting with the imperialism that affects cultural
production and distribution in particular, via commercial constraints—
5

Pierre Bourdieu, ed., La Misère du monde, Paris 1993.
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and also liberated from all the national and nationalist residues that still
prevent Europe from accumulating, augmenting and distributing all
that is most universal in the tradition of each of its component nations?
To end with a wholly concrete piece of ‘reasoned utopianism’, let me suggest that this issue, which I regard as crucial, be placed on the programme of the Ernst Bloch Centre and of the international organization
of ‘reflective utopians’ whose seat it could become.
Translated by John Howe

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