Bourdieu and „Science”

The fields known as sociology of knowledge and sociology of science changed considerably in the 1960–1970’s. Pierre Bourdieu was one of the players in these fields who tried to throw light on the specificity of the operations of the scientific field and the social conditions for the progress of reason by applying his general theory to them. In my current essay, I study Bourdieu’s analysis of the scientific field from the point of view of how his experiment relates to his work as a whole. Besides attempting to find out if Bourdieu was consistent in applying his theory, my study aims at finding out when Bourdieu began to attribute a special importance to the operations of the scientific field and when he renounced his theory about the reproduction of social privileges and social order. In his analyses of the scientific field, Bourdieu did not attempt to analyze social inequalities, and I suggest that this can be attributed to his two different perspectives. On the one hand, he adopted the perspective of the “external observer” when he analyzed a particular scientific case, but, on the other hand, he assumed the “internal” perspective of a (social) scientist when science itself or science’s position in social space was at stake. Finally, I attempt to examine Bourdieu’s sociological analysis concerning the field of the sociology of science, pointing out that—despite his promise—he did not carry out a sociological analysis of the sociology of science but attempted to redefine the framework of the sociology of science and to reinforce his own position within his field.