Habitus,Freedom ,andReflexivity - lamclamc.ulb.ac.be/IMG/pdf/Habitus_Freedom_and_Reflexivity.pdf · Bourdieu’s treatment of this ... I show the reason for their incompatibility

THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY VOL. 19 (6): 728–755

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DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345892 http://tap.sagepub.com

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Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

Mathieu Hilgers

FREE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS

ABSTRACT. The question of freedom is recurrent in the theory of habitus. In this

paper I propose that the notion of freedom is an essential and necessary com-

ponent for the coherence of the analyses which mobilize habitus both in terms

of their theoretical articulation and in terms of their grounding in empirical

reality. This argument can seem surprising considering that the theory of habi-

tus has often been accused of being deterministic. Yet I show that, from an

epistemological point of view, habitus theory is not deterministic. Bourdieu’s

treatment of this concept implies at least three principles that exclude deter-

minism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited

number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and exten-

sive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying and describing

these principles, I show the reason for their incompatibility with a determin-

istic perspective and consider their implications for the corresponding model

of action. I illustrate this analysis by a discussion of Loïc Wacquant’s carnal

sociology of the pugilistic universe which reveals why it is essential to under-

stand and explain the relation between habitus and freedom.

KEY WORDS: Bourdieu, determinism, freedom, habitus

May I congratulate Pierre Bourdieu, whose life and work constitute a living

refutation of the basic view of sociology according to which the individual is deter-

mined by social relations? He has never done that to which his origin and training pre-

destined him, rather always doing whatever put him in open opposition to the

power of groups and institutions internalized in us—the very thing that, under the

names of “habitus” and “social field,” he made key to his analyses. (Beck, 1997)

Importing classic concepts into a system of thought often involves a series of

theoretical problems related to them. Sometimes these prove central for com-

pletely understanding the stakes and the fruitfulness of an analytical model.

Classic theories of habituality have often seen their authors reflect on the

notion of freedom (for a review of these theories, see Camic, 1982/2000;

Héran, 1987; Rist, 1984).1The notion of habitus always evokes a disposition

that is difficult to transform, a finality without consciousness, perceptible and

comprehensible only by its manifestation as phenomenon, that is, by action in

the world; often, the challenge has been to establish the real consequence of

habitus in our behavior, to understand better its determinations in order better

to inflect them, to grasp the importance and the effect that consciousness of

constraints has on those constraints.2

What is the status of will, the conse-

quence of reflexivity, of being conscious of the process of habituality on judg-

ment? Can this consciousness modify the structure of representation of the

world, or the logic of action? Finally, can one be free with a habitus? As one

will see, the unexpected experience of Loïc Wacquant in the pugilistic universe

and his attempt to grasp it through the notion of habitus provide some interesting

perspectives and empirical situations through which to investigate these

questions (Wacquant, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2009).

Although it has rarely been discussed, I will propose the hypothesis that the

notion of freedom is an essential and necessary component for the analyses

which mobilize habitus both in terms of their theoretical articulation and in

terms of their grounding in empirical reality. This argument can seem surprising

for a perspective which has often been accused of being deterministic.

Nevertheless I believe that from an epistemological point of view habitus the-

ory, and more specifically Bourdieu’s treatment of habitus, a concept that he

has refined and made useful for social sciences, excludes determinism. This

study aims to identify the theoretical developments linked to this exclusion. I

will thus consider the role of freedom by approaching habitus theory from

a constructivist point of view. By restricting myself to the notion of habitus,

I do not intend to exhaust the question. This paper can function as a first step

in thinking through the connection between empirical experience and the

imperatives related to the will to forge a theoretical model, to reconstruct the

progressive and indefinite adjustment of a series of explicative hypotheses to

an indefinite series of singular experiences, but also in general to consider the

importance of freedom in Bourdieu (Bouveresse & Roche, 2004; Quiniou,

1996; Sapiro, 2004) and in sociology (De Coster, 1996).

To highlight the relation between habitus and freedom I will mobilize the

work of Wacquant devoted to the boxing world, more precisely his book Body

and Soul (2004), as a vivid illustration of the question that I am focusing on

here. Indeed “the concept of habitus as operant philosophy of action and

methodological guide” organizes the entirety of this book (Wacquant, 2005,

p. 470). The theoretical agenda of Body and Soul is “to engage, exemplify, and

test empirically the notion of habitus by disclosing in considerable detail how

a particular type of habitus is concretely fabricated” (Wacquant, 2005,

p. 453). This is why it is not surprising that one finds again, at least implicitly,

the relation between habitus and freedom at the heart of Wacquant’s descrip-

tions of the pugilistic universe. His position in the field shows perfectly some

decisive aspects of this relation and the importance of clarifying them.

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY 729

Why Is Bourdieu Not a Determinist?

By the importation of the notion of habitus into the social sciences, Pierre

Bourdieu attempts to overcome a series of oppositions: subjectivism vs.

objectivism, micro vs. macro, strategy vs. non-strategy, freedom vs. deter-

minism, and so on. Among others, his work takes a stand in the debate

between Sartrian free will and Lévi-Straussian determinism. In proposing a

praxeological perspective (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, 1972/1977), Bourdieu’s

ambition is to overcome these oppositions while keeping their contributions

to the sociological treatment of action. The praxeological mode of knowledge

“is the product of a double theoretical translation” (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a,

p. 235).3Bourdieu’s project is to appropriate the objectivist approach, while

questioning the conditions of possibility of primary experience, and to sur-

pass it by emphasizing the weakness of the objectivist foundation—which

refuses any kind of self-interpretation or reflexive consideration of its own

conditions of possibility. By showing that this kind of knowledge is consti-

tuted in opposition to primary experience, Bourdieu stresses the impossibility

of integrating a theory of practical knowledge of the social world into a

strictly objectivist perspective. Praxeological knowledge is useful because it

effects a synthesis between the givens of objectivist knowledge (which it

preserves and surpasses all while incorporating its assumptions that allow a

theory of action) and those of practical knowledge of the social world.

Habitus is at the heart of the theory that Bourdieu develops through this

method and that Wacquant mobilizes and discusses in order to grasp the

pugilistic world.

Bourdieu’s treatment of this notion implies at least three principles that

exclude determinism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors

from a limited number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the

intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying

and describing these principles, I will show the reason for their incompatibility

with a deterministic perspective and will attempt to demonstrate what they

imply for his theoretical model and more broadly for the analyses which

mobilize the notion of habitus.

The Production of an Infinite Number of Behaviors from a Limited

Number of Principles

Habitus generates an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of

principles. It is a generative system composed of limited, transposable princi-

ples. The agent incorporates rules throughout his or her socialization and

social trajectory; these rules are few in number but determine a representa-

tional matrix as well as a matrix of action. The formal rules at the heart of

these matrices’ functioning are limited but transposable to a plurality of con-

texts, and their content can vary infinitely. Habitus resembles a generative

730 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

grammar (Bourdieu, 1967) because it allows the combination of elements

more or less similar in form but whose content differs with each agent.4The

agent’s mode of social functioning is simultaneously constrained and enabled

by a structure that is both structuring and structured, composed of a restricted

number of principles that allow the production of an infinite number of

behaviors. I discuss later what this implies.

Permanent Mutation

Habitus is a dynamic notion composed of schemes that produce practices as

well as schemes of classification that allow the perception and appreciation

of practices. The agent perceives, understands, evaluates, adapts, and acts in

a situation according to his or her habitus. The actions produced and their

results can have a varyingly important influence on the individual’s percep-

tion of things and, in consequence, on his or her dispositions (toward action

and perception). Because of its evolutionary dimension, habitus determines

practice but is also determined by it. Habitus is thus in a state of permanent

mutation, all the more so because it is exposed to heterogeneous contexts and

situations. This mutation can reinforce or weaken already acquired disposi-

tions. Because of these successive modifications, one can only grasp this

dynamic notion at a precise moment in the history of an agent through the

recomposition of this history up to the present.

In addition to the difficulty of analytically reconstituting a single habi-

tus, at a collective level all forms of generalizing a given behavior—

between individuals who share a similar habitus, for example—must

remain fundamentally approximate. In fact, it is impossible for two

agents of identical condition and origin to live exactly the same situa-

tions or experiences in a similar order. Even so, if we do manage to iden-

tify some practices shared by the members of a group, they still won’t be

substitutable or impersonal. “It is in a relation of homology, of diversity

within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity charac-

teristic of their social conditions of production, that the singular habitus

of the different members of the same class are united” (Bourdieu,

1972/1977, p. 86).

If there exists a structural affinity between individuals who share a common

belonging, we must still admit that each one’s relationship to contexts will be

different. As a result of such variation and permanent mutation, the effects of

habitus are partially indeterminate.5This indeterminacy does not make possible

an analysis of the social world characterized by radical determinism.

The Limits of Sociological Understanding

The last principle considered here follows logically from the second and is

specific to the analysis of the social sciences. One can grasp only approximately


the different elements that have formed and continue to form habitus. It is

impossible to apprehend them all or even to understand perfectly the influence

of a single one of them. This is why, for example, in his book on Heidegger

(Bourdieu, 1991b), Bourdieu reminds us that it would be necessary, in order

to describe the ethos or generic habitus animating individuals in the field of

German philosophy, to conduct a rereading of German philosophy and intel-

lectual tradition from a praxeological perspective. Incapable of bringing such

a vast project to fruition, he resorts to formulating hypotheses in the form of

“conditional totalizations”—that is, by generalizing a theoretical opinion

which, for lack of an ability to develop the empirical grounding that it needs,

remains limited to the formulation of hypotheses.

These three elements intrinsic to the model allow us to think through the

unpredictability of practice. The production of an infinite number of behaviors

from a restricted number of principles implies the infinite variety of practices

possible for an individual; permanent mutation points to the relative malleability

of habitus throughout the trajectory of an agent and therefore to the limits of

any fixed analysis; and the intensive and extensive limits of sociological

understanding account for the impossibility of grasping the real in its totality

as well as the poor predictive ability of sociology. However, does the unpre-

dictability that sociological science faces mean that practices are truly free or

indeterminate? To answer this question, or at least to illuminate its signifi-

cance for Bourdieu and the authors who mobilize the notion of habitus, we

must understand the role of these principles within a theory, which aims to

identify and conceptualize a system that generates practices. Consistent with

the limits that I have set for this study, I will pursue this analysis while

remaining at the internal level of the model. Rather than focusing on the limits

specific to social science, I will concentrate on the production of behaviors

from a limited number of principles and on permanent mutation.

The Analogy of Experience

The system that generates practices is made up of certain components that are

applicable to multiple situations in everyday life. According to Bourdieu, the

similarity between different practices and reactions of a single agent originates

in an analogical principle: “… a transfer of schemes that the habitus performs

on the basis of acquired equivalences, facilitating the substitutability of one

reaction for another and enabling the agent to master all problems of a similar

form that may arise in new situations” (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 94). This

analogical principle allows, by practical substitutability, a small number of

generative schemes to manage cognitive and evaluative structures and,

thereby, the perception and organization of action.6The transposition outside

the ring of the system of schemata of perception, appreciation, and action

characteristic of their craft by the boxers whom Wacquant (2004) studied


illustrates this principle well. Even if numerous boxers violate the command-

ments of the pugilistic catechism (such as regulated practices of abstinence

that compose “the trinity of the pugilistic cult”: food, social life, and sexual

commerce; Wacquant, 2005, p. 461), the more they are engaged in the Manly

Art, the more they perceive the world and act in function of an ethos related to

their pugilistic practices.

Habitus is a system of durable and transposable dispositions. The analogy

of experience7facilitates at the same time recourse to identical schemes for

different situations and agents’ capacity for improvisation, as well as adapta-

tion, improvised or not, to new contexts. This practical substitutability and

the postulate of the world’s being apprehended as (and composed of) homo-

logical structures permit and assist the extension of the analytical model to all

behaviors. But this abstract model, even if it only draws meaning, form, and

substance from practical manifestations—and even though a disposition

remains “irreducible to any finite or infinite series of actualizations, that is, to

any actual fact or group of facts” (E. Bourdieu, 1998, p. 39)—can be nothing

other than a theoretical artifact.8From that moment,

… the description through construction that is made possible by mastery of

the generative formula of practices has to remain within the limits that are

set on practical logic by the very fact that it derives not from this formula

but from its practical equivalent—a system of schemes capable of orienting

practice without entering consciousness except in an intermittent and partial

way. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, pp. 269–270)

In a certain sense, the theoretical model is thus distinct from the mastery of

agents in practice; it only gives an idea, both very close and very distant, of

the real. Theory must always be readjusted for the sake of this real, for the

social world remains irreducible to the architectures we give it.

Practical logic recalls the plurality of interrelated aspects of the real. This

complexity explains how it works with a certain freedom compared to logical

logic. Practical logic is the application of a

… partially integrated system of generative schemes which, being partially

mobilized [italics added] in relation to each particular situation, produces, in

each case ... a practical definition of the situation and the functions of the

action ... which, with the aid of a simple yet inexhaustible combinatory, gen-

erates the actions best suited to fulfill these functions within the limits of the

available means. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 267)

The piecemeal nature of schematic mobilization anticipates the critiques that a

monothetic, monolithic, and unilateral principle would like to make of habitus, and

suggests agents’ ability to adapt to a variety of contexts, as shown perfectly by the

fact that a young white European graduate student at one of the most prestigious

university’s in the world can become a boxer in the black ghetto of Chicago. It

allows us better to understand the regulated freedom that characterizes the unpre-

dictability of practice but also the plural dimension of the process of socialization.9


Habitus works through an analogical transfer of schemes that allows us to

apprehend the real through a relatively fixed system of perception. Past experi-

ences structure transposable dispositions, give meaning to new experiences

and situations, and contribute to the more or less congruent adjustment of

practice to objective rules and structures. From this analogical schema the

creative perception of a sense whose newness depends on the situation is put

to work. This sense is produced by the immanent law of habitus that makes

the agent adjust, un-adjust, and readjust his or her practices to be compatible

with objective reality as it appears subjectively.

The nonequivalence of objective context and subjective appreciation gives

rise to phenomena of hysteresis of variable importance. These phenomena

appear when the individual’s most fixed dispositions, which are almost natu-

ralized and relatively unchangeable, are faced with a situation where they

have become obsolete. Such gaps explain, for example, the difficulty that

some agents have in grasping the meaning of historic upheavals, their inability

to process objective events. Because of fixed dispositions, an individual can

remain closed off to the evolution of a context, to the modification of its

objective rules, of its function, and therefore of his or her own position within

that context. The lasting effect of the most essential structures thus stands out

in situations of hysteresis. The evolution and makeup of habitus always

remain dependent on practice. Habitus unites objective reality and subjective

representation. From Bourdieu’s perspective, this union is the principle that

allows action by the subject in the world.10

The more it is mastered, the more

it contributes to freedom.

The principle of analogy, since it allows us to envisage a multitude of prac-

tices from a restricted number of principles, facilitates the development of a

synoptic schema that authorizes the simultaneous, monothetic apprehension

of “meanings that are produced and used polythetically” by agents (Bourdieu,

1972/1977, p. 107; 1980/1990b, pp. 83–4). The analyst has the opportunity to

exercise a power of generalization by examining as arrested phases the possible

scenarios that the agent can see only in temporal succession.11

If the analyst

does not go beyond this generalization, he or she will not be able to account

for the unpredictability of practice because it is characteristic

… of a polythetic relationship to experience. This is a type of relationship to the

world which allows one to distribute in succession attitudes that would be

judged contradictory, but which when referred to contextual occurrences create

an approximate rhythm of variations in behavior. (Maesschalck, 1997, p. 13)

The intersection of the principle of an infinite number of behaviors from a

limited number of rules with a specific situation indicates the general space

of an agent’s possibilities of action. As this space can never be totally recon-

structed, the action remains partly unpredictable. Does this unpredictability

signify freedom, or could it at least be a sign of it?


An agent’s freedom can only be expressed through the regulated mecha-

nisms of the system that generates practices. The challenge of Bourdieu is

thus to convert necessity into choice without falling into the traps of deter-

minism or total freedom. Habitus is a unifying principle that associates subjec-

tive desire with the evolution of objective finality. Bourdieu’s schematism,

according to Maesschalck (1997), goes beyond the Kantian perspective

… of a mechanism of subsumption into categories because it attempts to

resolve, in a practical formula, the dialectic’s most radical demand: the

transformation of necessity into free choice. ... The coupling of practical

schemes and classificatory schemes makes it possible, in fact, to unite the

internal coherence of practices and their external coherence as self-identity

and difference from the non-self. (p. 20)

This schematism allows us to pose an objective principle of orientation and a

subjective principle of appreciation but also to grasp diversity through a synthetic

union of the two. Bourdieu’s model must for its internal coherence effect a

synthesis between necessity and freedom. Moreover, the discrepancies

between empirical reality and the theoretical articulation of the social world,

between actual behaviors and behaviors that conform to the model’s rationale,

the gaps between opus operatum and modus operandi, between act and

power, between dispositions and positions, between objective structures and

cognitive structures, become significant thanks to this relatively free unpre-

dictability of behaviors that the model theorizes, in particular, through a

dynamic conception of habitus.12

Habitus as a Dynamic Notion

How does what I have called the principle of permanent mutation play out in

the formation of habitus? Bourdieu does not say much on this question. Even

so, using his work we can conceive of habitus as the superposition of different

layers of socialization. Among these, one must distinguish a primary layer

and a secondary layer. Both are made up of the singular appropriation of collec-

tive reference points that is realized through the particular experiences of

agents (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966).13

Progressively and involuntarily,

agents specialize themselves through their durable exposition to particular

contexts. They also do it voluntarily, for example through the acquisition of

special aptitudes such as these of the Manly Art in the case of Wacquant.

The primary layer develops from archetypal and collective representations

articulated through a system of binary oppositions that differentiates the sexes

(man/woman, brother/sister, etc.), time (day/night, morning/evening, short/long,

etc.), size (large/small, wide/thin, etc.), place (inside/outside, open/closed,

etc.). The primary layer is the fruit of sedimentation by generations of social-

ization. The relationship of domination between the sexes is, for example,


characteristic of this layer. Always present in spite of manifest attempts to

overcome it, it proves the difficulty of reversing this sedimentation.14

Changes in the primary layer of habitus happen slowly and laboriously, as

shown for example by Wacquant’s attempts to acquire an art that nothing, neither

his origin nor his trajectory, predestined him to practice, least of all in a

context that was a priori strange to him and within which he was a statistical

anomaly (Wacquant, 2004).

Produced in the reproduction of domestic practices, in daily activities that

internalize the roles and functions of the family unit, the primary layer is par-

ticularized during early childhood. The family transmits models of represen-

tation that organize agents’ perceptions and display the behaviors that will

structure their practices. This layer of socialization is administered essentially

through family and school. The process of acquisition implies a relationship

of identification that is in no way a conscious imitation of an objectivated

model. It is a process of reproduction. Agents internalize objective reality and

help reproduce the categories they have perceived, because they situate their

own acts in relation to this perception of the world. In a certain sense, through

practice, agents make what they perceive exist. They externalize their inter-

nalization. This process of acquisition participates in the construction of what

one is, what one becomes, develops a proclivity for the development of a pos-

sible “self,” of a finality which is never totally definitive or completely deter-

mined. “What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like

knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is” (Bourdieu,

1980/1990b, p. 73). The agent grows up and the secondary level of his or her

habitus develops throughout the agent’s relative autonomization. This is

made up of a particularized collective dimension. Wacquant’s descriptions of

the pugilistic universe provide a vivid illustration of this phenomenon when

they underline the intromission of the individual and the collective in the

transmission process of the Manly Art (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 99–126). Even

if an individual has a lifestyle or a habitus typical of a group or class, he or

she nonetheless remains a single individual.15

This delineation that I suggest allows us to grasp through a synchronic

view of the state of a habitus’s makeup the proportion and therefore the sig-

nificance of different moments of socialization in the history of an individual;

in other words, their strength of determination. It highlights the importance of

the trajectory and the evolving nature of habitus. Daily life and its events rein-

force or weaken a partially moving habitual nature. The experiences that sedi-

ment habitus make of it “the materialization of ... memory” (Bourdieu,

1980/1990b, p. 291, n. 3), which it perpetuates through practice.

The earliest experiences are the most determinative, leaving the strongest

and most lasting imprint. It is they that form schemes of perception, thought,

and action.

The very logic of its genesis makes habitus a chronologically ordered series of

structures, where one structure of a given level specifies the structures at lower


levels (which are thus genetically anterior) and structures the higher-level

structures through the structuring action that it exercises on the structured expe-

riences that generate these structures. (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 284, tr. J.R.)

Habitus appears thus as a relatively and relationally malleable entity. It is

modified through the experiences that constitute it, through encounters and

contacts in a real that is always already relational. The earliest experiences

mark, more than others, the perception of the world and the practices that

result from them. Throughout life, the individual must face new situations

and draw on resources from past experiences to adapt to them. The importance

of early experiences also results from the tendency of habitus to protect its

own constancy and defend itself against change and questioning. The indi-

vidual evolves in a universe tailored to reinforce his or her own dispositions

and to receive them favorably. By limiting exposure to unknown environ-

ments, without necessarily being conscious of doing so, the individual avoids

contact with information likely to challenge the accumulated information that

fashions his or her representation of the world. This is why many anthropol-

ogists produce reflection about their own society when they come back from

the field (e.g., Bourdieu, 1962). Everyday life in the field affects the ways in

which they think, perceive the world, and act.16

Modifications are made relatively irreversibly. Throughout one’s evolu-

tion, or trajectory, or aging, mental and other structures progressively close

off to the principle of practice. Habitus is the fruit of history and generates,

by itself, (practices and therefore) history

… in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active

presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of

schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the “correctness”

of practices and their constancy over time. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 54)

In other words, the product of history is what makes history (both individual

and collective).

A fundamental question is to establish how an individual can voluntarily

affect his habitus, that is, modify his own dispositions, and through them his

perceptions and practices. In my view, Body and Soul describes this phe-

nomenon from two points of view. The first is the standpoint of the athletes,

including Wacquant himself, who construct their bodies and improve their

performance by following a rigorous and demanding training regimen. The

second is the standpoint of the researcher who is immersed in a new reality

and who uses the analytical resources of his discipline to transform his own

dispositions. The paradox in Wacquant’s attempt is that he was developing an

epistemic reflexivity, both for his analyses and for his integration in the field,

in order to acquire a non-reflexive practice. Indeed, “boxing consists of a

series of strategic exchanges in which one pays for hermeneutical mistakes

immediately …: action and its evaluation are fused and reflexive returns is by

definition excluded from the activity” (Wacquant, 2004, p. 59). Even if the


resources it provides are insufficient by themselves—insofar as they have to

be coupled with a real practical learning—sociological reflexivity constitutes

a powerful tool to adapt dispositions and to ease the conversion into a strange

universe. Here “epistemic reflexivity is deployed, not at the end of the project,

ex post, when it comes to drafting the final research report, but durante, at

every stage in the investigation” (Wacquant, 2009, p. 147).

An agent’s freedom in the face of determination of self by self, of future

history by past history, of what is by what has been, resides in the ability to

objectivize his or her own condition. This is exactly what Wacquant describes

when he relates his experience in the pugilistic universe and demonstrates

practically, through a particular experiment in apprenticeship, Bourdieu’s

idea according to which agents fully become Subjects when, through the

mediation of a reflexive effort, they identify and begin the work of gaining

(relative) control over their own disposition. This reflexivity allows one,

depending on the context, to give free rein, to temper, to inhibit, or even to

oppose dispositions to each other. It “enables us to monitor, up to a certain

point, some of the determinisms that operate through the relation of immediate

complicity between position and dispositions” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992,

p. 136). Thus in a given situation, the malleability of a habitus, its potential

for transformation, its ability to adapt, are proportional to its degree of sedi-

mentation, in other words to the layer involved in action. The potential trans-

formation of habitus can be done depending on the layer involved and on the

intensity, newness, and repetition of a given experience. Wacquant’s descrip-

tions of the repetitive, denuded, and ascetic character of boxers’ training are

an excellent illustration of this phenomenon (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 60, 66,

104). If the entirety of habitus is present in an action, some of its traits can be

inhibited, reinforced, or emphasized. The experience will not have the same

effects on each component of habitus.17

Its malleability is precisely what

enables it to adapt to a plurality of social universes. This also shows how

habitus depends on the practical universe with which it is associated.

Body and Soul descriptions show clearly that this first step in analyzing

freedom in habitus shouldn’t limit us to understanding freedom in the

abstract. It should allow us to illuminate, from a theoretical point of view,

why “habitus is not a destiny” (Bourdieu, 1997/2000b, p. 180). Agents can

objectivate the influence that they exert on the social space that determines

them. The practices they produce by means of categories of perception,

thought, and action that they have internalized through contact with objective

structures participate in the modification of these structures and thus, eventu-

ally, in the modification of internalized categories. This is why social agents

are determined only insofar as they determine themselves; but “the categories

of perception and appreciation which provide the principle of this (self-)deter-

mination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic condi-

tions of their constitution” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). An agent

with the means to determine him- or herself through knowledge of objective


mechanisms can use them “precisely to step back and gain distance from

dispositions” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). The emancipation this

knowledge aims for requires knowledge of the principles at the heart of the

action. From that moment, as Bouveresse (2004) remarks against accusations

of determinism, “it is not sociology but the desocialization and the depoliti-

cization of the problem of freedom that constitute a threat for true freedom”

(p. 13). In the same line of thought, we can distinguish two types of freedom

in Bourdieu: unconscious freedom and conscious freedom, or, more pre-

cisely, a freedom prior to sociological revelation and a freedom after it.

Similarly, these two levels of freedom are found concretely in the work of

Wacquant devoted to the production of the pugilistic habitus.

Freedom Prior to Sociological Consciousness

Habitus is an ordering principle of regulated improvisation (principium impor-

tans ordinem ad actum; Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 262; 1990a, pp. 78–79;

1980/1990b, p. 10), it generates practices that tend to “reproduce the regulari-

ties immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative

principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities

in the situation” (Bourdieu, 1972/1977, p. 78). The social space and its con-

straints form a place at the center of which, by the acquired systems of gener-

ative schemes and within the framework of its limits, the agent can freely

exercise his or her practice. The objective structure of which habitus is the

product governs, through it, practice by means of constraints and limits origi-

nally assigned to the agent’s inventions. Creation always happens in a context

that constitutes the agent and that the agent appropriates actively; it can thus

only be realized within the limits of this space and within the limits of the sys-

tem of practice. The generative system is composed of a restricted number of

principles that make it possible to generate an infinity of relatively unpre-

dictable practices, but these are limited in their diversity. It is in this sense that

theory of habituality can move beyond the debate between freedom and deter-

minism. Habitus is the system of unchosen principles of choice that allows

improvisation, creation, and innovation. It is a system that generates regulated

improvisation and that subjectively activates and reactivates the objective

meaning of context.

Socialization bestows creative capabilities on agents that allow them to

invent freely within the limits of the conditions of their existence, their dispo-

sitions and context, and their adaptations to situations. The generative system

is conceived as a reproductive system. It is founded on the internalization of

an exteriority whose sense is given, throughout socialization, from originary

experiences and from the individual trajectory that particularizes and composes

the (di)visions, hierarchizations, classifications, and appreciations of repre-

sentations of the social world. The practical relationship with the future


determines present practice. Habitus is constituted and determined according

to a probable future that it helps actualize through anticipation. The embodied

objectivity of the social world generates objective regularities that surpass

agents, but which agents actualize by their daily practice because they are

formed by the context that they themselves form. These embodied represen-

tations generate the perception of a subjective world and form the basis for

the particular anticipation of this perceived world, so much so that, starting

from a regulated freedom, practices tend by their consequences to reproduce

in the real (i.e., to make exist) this subjective perception (e.g., relationships

perceived as corrupt can generate corrupting behaviors that participate in the

existence of corruption).

The future is virtually inscribed in the present and is, in a certain way,

perceived as already being there by practical schemes that impose order on

action. “Habitus operationalizes” the structural social explanation by granting

to the Subject its active character (Alexander, 1995).18

The understanding of

the world is always elaborated in relation to and starting from a background

inscribed in practice. Agents understand this without necessarily requiring a

reflexive gesture. By actively and unknowingly appropriating this back-

ground, agents generate representations. These representations are sometimes

formulated as engagements, as finalities, as ambitions, and so on, but most of

the time they remain unformulated, even unformulatable, and structure intel-

ligent action in the world. This intelligence, without being formulated, flows

from a comprehension that is for the most part not made explicit yet always

present (Taylor, 2000). Often, practice evolves according to the principle of

an intelligence without consciousness, anticipating without always knowing

that it is the product of and that it produces anticipations.

The freedom that habitus leaves room for has an involuntary aspect. This

aspect typical of practical logic allows a form of unconscious, or scarcely

conscious, freedom. The amnesia of the genesis of this freedom (which in certain

aspects is illusory) makes it possible to forget that at the source of a belief or

choice is socialization. It is as such that, in a mode very reminiscent of Pascal,

Bourdieu considers that “if the decision to believe ... is to be carried out

successfully, it must also obliterate itself from the memory of the believer”

(Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 49).19

In this way he finds a solution to the antinomy

of decision-based belief that Pascal had left unresolved (one cannot simulta-

neously believe x and believe that x is the fruit of one’s will to believe x). The

agent believes his or her vision of the world to be natural, having forgotten its

genesis. Most of the people who train in the gym where Wacquant undertook

his pugilistic eduction believe that “You’re born a boxer” (or not). Here the

apprenticeship of the ethnographer clearly underlines the paradox that

… the belief in the innate character of the boxer’s ability can peacefully

coexist with an unrelenting and rigid ethic of work and striving. The native

myth of the gift of the boxer is an illusion founded in reality what fighters

take for a natural capacity (“You’ve got to have it in you”) is in effect this


peculiar nature resulting from the protracted process of inculcation of the

pugilistic habitus, a process that often begins in early childhood, either

within the gym itself … or in the antechamber to the gym that is the ghetto

street. (Wacquant, 2004, p. 99)

The pugilistic habitus is “this cultivated nature whose social genesis has

become literally invisible to those who perceive it through the mental categories

that are its product’’ (Wacquant, 2004, p. 99).

Freedom of action is actualized through the product of a socialization that

implies an involuntary aspect of practice; thus paradoxically this type of free-

dom can hold back a liberation from social conditions—which in any case is

always limited. It seems to permit agents to believe that they are free.20

It allows

belief and choice to “be experienced simultaneously as logically necessary and

sociologically unconditioned” (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 50). However, this

freedom is nevertheless not totally illusory. The system of dispositions makes

it possible to freely generate thoughts, perceptions, and actions within the limits

of historical and social conditions that circumscribe and fashion its production

(Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 55). These conditionings allow the agent relative

autonomy when he or she faces present situations.

Not all agents have the same degree of autonomy. “Nothing is simultane-

ously freer and more constrained than the action of the good player”

(Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 63). The degree of freedom varies, in fact, with the

social position of the individual and the degree of officialization, institution-

alization, and ritualization of the context. The possibilities of habitus are

realized all the more freely when they have a conducive space in which to

become manifest. If agents can master the objective rules that structure a

field, then they are at ease playing with them while remaining in line with

their requirements, transgressing them in a regular way and thereby distin-

guishing themselves through excellence, rather than being stuck in a conformity

limited to pure and simple execution. Conversely, the less congruity there is

between objective structures and the structures of habitus, the less agents can

“fall into line with rules that are made against them” (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b,

p. 298, n. 12). The interaction between dispositions and situations causes

“agents to some extent [to] fall into the practice that is theirs rather than freely

choosing it or being impelled into it by mechanical constraints” (Bourdieu,

1990a, p. 90). This spontaneity is indeterminate because it functions within

the urgency of the situation. An individual constrained by the instantaneity of

the present makes choices instinctively based on his or her embodied dispo-

sitions, without logical or rational calculations. “In fact, practical logic can

only function by taking all sorts of liberties with the most elementary princi-

ples of logical logic”; it develops from schemes that are “partially mobilized

in relation to each particular situation” (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 267). The

individual will be all the more at ease since there is an important correspon-

dence between what he or she is and should be in the situation. This ease can

lead to the blossoming of a creative freedom. Habitus adjusted in advance to


the individual’s position and made for it (by the mechanisms determining

vocation and co-optation) contributes to making the position, especially since

it has a large margin of freedom and since there is a significant distance

between “the social conditions of ... production” and “the social demands and

constraints inscribed in the position” (Bourdieu, 1980/1993, p. 141).

It is necessary to distinguish objective necessity from experienced

necessity. Sociology exposes objective necessities while postulating that

everything must have a social reason for existing. The degree of determi-

nation of the world as it appears subjectively depends on the knowledge

we have of it. In a perspective very reminiscent of Spinoza, Bourdieu

(1980/1993) declares:

Whereas misrecognition of necessity contains a form of recognition of

necessity, and probably the most absolute, the most total form, since it is

unaware of itself as such, knowledge of necessity does not at all imply the

necessity of that recognition. (p. 25)

Individuals are as free as they are conscious and knowledgeable of the

constraints placed on them. Sociology is a powerful tool for allowing this

growing awareness to take place.

Freedom After Sociological Consciousness

In Body and Soul, Wacquant (2004) offers a paradigmatic demonstration of

how sociological consciousness can be deployed as a tool to modify habitus.

The book “focus[es] on the generic properties of pugilistic embodiment … to

spotlight the manner whereby [boxers] acquire and activate the system of

schemata of perception, appreciation, and action of their craft” (Wacquant,

2005, p. 454). In addition, it shows how Wacquant modified his own habitus

to become a(n apprentice) boxer and to be accepted by his gym mates and

integrated in his field site. From this point of view, Body and Soul is not only

an empirical observation but an empirical experimentation which highlights

concretely the difficulties inherent in the project of shaping one’s habitus and

the contribution of sociological objectivation to the process of mastering and

building oneself.

During his apprenticeship of boxing in a context far removed from his

original social milieu, Wacquant (2004) became so deeply immersed in the

pugilistic world that he “thought for a while of aborting [his] academic

career ‘to turn pro’” (p. 4). But, even in such moments of sensual and moral

epiphany, Busy Louie, as his gym mates called him, remained a highly

educated Frenchman who was leading a sort of “Dr. Jekyll-and-Mister Hyde

existence, boxing by day and writing social theory by night” (Wacquant,

2009, p. 145). He was thoroughly embedded in the social scene of the gym

but, as he makes clear in the book’s closing pages, he was still different


from the other athletes training there (even if they could not imagine what

a sociologist is and does).21

This difference, rooted in his social condition

and trajectory, facilitates keeping the relative distance from within the social

game studied that the ethnographer needs, even the fight itself and the rou-

tine of training presuppose precisely that one suspend reflexivity. Indeed,

Wacquant’s book shows that adopting the Manly Art in the ghetto cannot be

reduced to the moments spent in the ring or in the gym training. Becoming

a fighter is to acquire an ethos and an ethic of life transposable outside the

ring. During the period of “inactivity” caused by getting his nose broken,

Wacquant had an opportunity to reflect and the sociologist could assess

more accurately his difference within the field (Wacquant, 2004, p. 7). Thus

even as he often forgets why he is there (originally to find a “platform for

observation in the ghetto, a place to meet potential informants”; Wacquant,

2009, p. 141), even if for a moment he considers dropping out of university

and becoming a professional prizefighter, Wacquant’s investment in the

game and the amnesia of the genesis of his presence in the field remain

always provisional. These are precisely particular moments in the process of

inquiry. Every good ethnographer engaged in long-term immersion forgets

during some moments the object that he is observing, because he is discov-

ering new facets of it; he becomes overwhelmed by the site and washed over

by the endless flow of social life. But he never forgets for too long his origin

and the springs of his trajectory, especially as he retains a broader freedom

of choice compared to the people with whom he shares the site. As coach

DeeDee reminded Wacquant in the last sentence of the book, the sociologist

“don’t need to get into the d’ring” as a professional (Wacquant, 2004, p. 255);

he has a life and a future outside of it.

In this book, epistemic reflexivity constitutes a tool, not only to understand

the process of habitus construction, but also to describe the potential effects

of sociological knowledge on this process. As Wacquant (2009) aptly

reminds us, habitus is a set of acquired dispositions:

No one is born a boxer (least of all, me!): the training of fighters consists

precisely in physical drills, ascetic rules of life …, and social games geared

toward instilling in them new abilities, categories, and desires, those spe-

cific to the pugilistic cosmos. (Wacquant, 2009, p. 142; see also 1998)

To acquire the boxer’s dispositions and to change his own habitus, Wacquant

trained as a boxer amidst amateurs and professionals for three years. The

change of habitus is effected only when it is embodied—in other words, when

the modifications have been learned in and by corporal practices, because

… practical mastery operates beneath the level of consciousness and discourse,

and this matches perfectly with a commanding feature of the experience of

pugilistic learning, in which mental understanding is of little help (and can even

be a serious hindrance in the ring) so long as one has not grasped boxing tech-

nique with one’s body. (Wacquant, 2009, pp. 142–143)


Moreover, his own trajectory enabled Wacquant to grasp analytically the way

in which he could work to modify his own habitus. While his gym mates learn

the body techniques through an invisible and implicit pedagogy, because of

his social science knowledge and ability to objectivize the social world,

Wacquant was in a position to both undergo and analyze the practices of

pugilistic inculcation and the pedagogical work effected at the Woodlawn

Boys’ Club. This demonstrates that individuals with different life experiences,

who have thus gained varied ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, can use

different dispositions to reach the same goal through different routes. It

shows also that the dispositions mobilized to acquire the techniques produce

their own goal. Contrary to most of his gym mates, Wacquant’s aim was ana-

lytical and was not to be a great prizefighter.

Body and Soul differs from other accounts of habitus because Wacquant

deployed the concept as a methodological device. He placed himself

… in the local vortex of action in order to acquire through practice, in real

time, the dispositions of the boxer with the aim of elucidating the magnetism

proper to the pugilistic cosmos [and to] push the logic of participant obser-

vation to the point where it becomes inverted and turns into observant

participation. (Wacquant, 2009, p. 145)

Through this work of “carnal sociology,” Wacquant shows concretely how,

through concrete practices aided by sociological consciousness, one can will-

fully change one’s habitus. The fact that his boxing career was short and his

only official fight was a defeat suggests two other points. First, the malleabil-

ity of habitus remains considerable if we compare Wacquant’s trajectory with

the normal and probable trajectory of similarly situated academics. Second,

although habitus can be changed, it takes an immense work to modify one’s

primary dispositions and the results are often below the skill level of specialists

born and bred with the social game in question—in this case boxers who have

trained since pre-adolescence (it is too late for Wacquant to become a highly

proficient boxer, let alone a champion). This also implies that a degree of

sociological consciousness is indispensable to assist in the process of habitus

modification, but that it does not suffice to durably transform dispositions.

The extension of freedom by sociological consciousness allows a normative

choice that consists in accepting necessity or not. The agent or the political

world can introduce modifying elements that may suffice to “transform the

result of mechanisms in the direction of our desires” (Bourdieu, 1982, p. 20).

The mere fact of knowing which mechanisms owe their efficiency to mis-

recognition, for example cases of “symbolic violence,” helps modify their

effects. Sociological science, therefore, in revealing the real, has liberating

virtues. It allows one to introduce a freedom relative to the original adhesion

and to become, partially, “master and possessor of social nature” (Bourdieu,

1982, p. 33), to “control the effects of the determinisms that operate” on the

social world (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 67). But by conceiving of freedom


as revelation, does Bourdieu not return to Pascal’s antinomy? If consciousness

makes it possible to act on the principles of socialization, if habitus is malleable,

does that not imply that will and consciousness can, for the best sociologists

among us, form the basis of the dispositions that make us believe things?

Following this reasoning to its end would suppose that one could acquire a dis-

position toward self-objectification in order to profit fully from one’s own free

will and exercise it in total consciousness. But is that not believing at the same

time as one decides to believe? To these questions, Bourdieu would probably

respond by distinguishing belief and scientific truth. Such a distinction high-

lights the ambiguity of this position that often wavers between construc-

tivism and realism, but it can still be discussed here.

Beyond regulated freedom, practical freedom appears to Bourdieu as the

consciousness of structures and determinations, which, in a certain way, signifies

that practical freedom is the possibility of a conscious and voluntary trans-

formation of objective structures. Here we are not far from Spinozian freedom:

real freedom is the knowledge of constraints.22

Individuals who are not

conscious of their determinations can believe they are free, mistake necessity

for virtue, and then select as the best choice the one toward which their habitus

leans. The freest individuals are those who, aware of their determinations,

end up either choosing them or transforming them. We find ourselves faced

with two levels of freedom. The first, without sociological awareness, seems

almost illusory. The internalization of structures allows us to think we are free

without being conscious of our own determinations. The second, fruit of

analytical thought about ourselves through the exposition of structures that a

reflexive distance makes possible—an awareness of our own habitus—

enables a kind of self-control. “Sociology frees us by freeing us from the illu-

sion of freedom ... from the misplaced belief in illusory freedoms. Freedom

is not something given: it is something you conquer—collectively”

(Bourdieu, 1990a, pp. 15–16). We can never dispose freely of these disposi-

tions, but we can better control them by having knowledge of them. As for

Spinoza (1928, part V), this conquered freedom implies virtue. Thus, in the

realm of science, for example, the double objectification implies an ethic that

incites to scientific virtue, that is, to raising the conditions of scientific rigor

(Hilgers, 2006). First of all

… because it is a science, [then because] if it is true that it is through knowl-

edge of determinations that only science can uncover that a form of freedom

which is the condition and correlate of an ethic is possible, then it is also true

that a reflexive science of society implies, or comprises, an ethic. (Bourdieu

& Wacquant, 1992, p. 198)

Throughout this growing awareness the agent enjoys greater freedom with

the rules. If the individual always tends toward the realization of his or her

social being, if the individual is moved by a conatus,23

then freedom without

sociological consciousness (or with only, through the power of spontaneous


sociology, a weak sociological consciousness) is the ability to anticipate a

strong probability and to make one’s own what must probably happen (in the

statistical sense). This is why agents conscious of their potential exclusion

from a social space often end up excluding themselves from it. In this way,

for example, awareness of discrepancies between the norms of the school and

their modes of representation, requirements, and relationship to knowledge

can lead the most disadvantaged segments of society to exclude themselves

from the school system on their own. In this case, when their subjective hope

is even weaker than their objective chance, the agents transform a probable

determination of their future into a chosen freedom. They contribute through

their self-determination to their own disqualification.

For Bourdieu, sociological thought can give access to an understanding of

the mechanisms which, beyond spontaneous reflections (and reflexivities),

make it possible for agents to identify the best strategies for attaining their

goals, and for the collectivity or politics to effect transformations of objective

structures. Sociological analysis can allow us to minimize social determinations

and help “universalize the conditions of access to the universal.” This freedom

that knowledge enables has ethico-moral ramifications. Awareness of the struc-

tures of socialization, of the mechanisms that structure social relationships in a

given field, can be used in the service of expanding access to the universal.

The degree of freedom is variable. In general, it grows as economic and

educational capital increase. It implies an effort to master the future that

requires a knowledge of the possible equivalence between objective poten-

tialities and subjective hopes. The importance of this equivalence underpins

all Bourdieu’s work. From his earliest writings, he writes that it allows “a life

plan, as a rational and reasonable expectation founded on futures that are suc-

cessively accessible given a certain effort” (Bourdieu, Darbel, Rivet, &

Seibel, 1963, p. 366). As early as his analyses of Algerian society, Bourdieu

shows that the most privileged classes have access to a greater degree of

freedom. This reading must not omit the social constraints endured by higher

classes. It is sufficient to recall, for example, the analyses of Norbert Elias on

Louis XIV and the weight of social codification (Elias, 1933/1983), or the

analyses of Bourdieu on matrimonial strategies (Bourdieu, 1962, 2002/2007)

in order to keep their importance in mind.

When Bourdieu passes from a formal to a substantial reflection on freedom,

he also passes from a scientific discourse on practice to a moral, politically

engaged one. The goal is no longer to study the relationship between socializa-

tion and freedom but to study that between freedom and emancipation. This

approach attempts, among other things, to help free the dominated from their

domination (but not only them, as everyone can benefit from sociological

knowledge), since the capacity for choice and the degree of freedom vary

depending on income, degree of qualification and instruction, and socioprofes-

sional categories. The conformity of subjective hopes with objective possibili-

ties allows a higher degree of self-fulfillment and attainment of one’s ambitions.


It is not merely a question of giving to the dominated the possibility of

reaching the same level of freedom through consciousness that the dominant

may enjoy through their habitus. Rather it is a question of a true self-liberation

through knowledge, and in this sense this liberation is aimed, without distinc-

tion, at all social agents. Only acquiring consciousness and distance from the

objective structures to which agents adapt allows them to exercise true free

will. Material freedom is not freedom of consciousness, even if it is a neces-

sary condition for it. This conception of freedom leads to an axiological

approach that is developed more specifically in Bourdieu’s last works. The

freedom of choice enabled by the unveiling of practical logic requires one to

choose a stance toward the Ideal. The individual must make a normative

choice according to a subjective moral value, and can try to open up to something

other than his or her own habitus. Until this moment behavioral unity was

determined by habitus; then habitus was introduced into the awareness of

practical logic’s functioning such that the Subject could make acts that, for

him- or herself, modify the concrete objective structure of the axiological uni-

verse, and could become, within certain limits, autonomous from social deter-

minations. Bourdieu’s last works seem to display a tension between his

analytic refocusing on the role of the field in the determination of practices

and the importance of subjective determination in the emergence of necessities

induced by the field. From a normative point of view, it seems that the capacity

for change that each agent contains must be reinforced by an increased aware-

ness of the functioning of the social world in order to remedy the inequalities

produced by objective structures.24

Conclusion

We have little or no ability to choose our socialization, and adaptation to a

field happens naturally, even instinctively; however, there is no coercion that

imposes our actions on us. Free choice often appears as an “obligatory freedom”

whereas it should be a conscious freedom (Bourdieu, 1991a, p. 95). And even

if freedom remains under constraints and is exercised in a space of objective

potentialities defined by the encounter between embodied dispositions and

the rules and relations that manage the social structure, the choices that result

from it are not identical in tenor and orientation if it is a conscious freedom

(Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 339–340). It becomes thus important to expand access

to rational means and to use “fully the margin of maneuver left to liberty”

(Bourdieu, 1999, p. 629); in other words, “it’s not a question of locking

agents into an ‘original social being’ treated as a destiny, a nature, but of offer-

ing them the possibility of taking on their habitus without guilt or suffering”

(Bourdieu, 1980/1993, pp. 23–24).

Agents can progressively emancipate themselves from their determinisms.

Throughout its progression, this emancipation becomes a duty since freedom


of consciousness implies a great responsibility: “… a knowledge of the

objective necessity of the field [offers] the possibility of freedom with respect

to that necessity, and therefore of a practical ethics aimed at increasing that

freedom” (Bourdieu, 1997/2000b, p. 117). This freedom requires conditions

of possibility (a certain quality of life and level of education in order to under-

stand oneself reflexively in a sociological way) to be met in order to be

attained; independently of these, for Bourdieu, even the promotion of freedom—

since it would point back to those conditions of possibility—allows us to

widen access to the universal.

Like all theories that employ the notion of habitus, Bourdieu’s model

attributes a specific status to freedom, even though it is not often discussed.

At the level of theory, this notion, or perhaps more precisely the notion of

indeterminateness, allows us through at least three principles (the production

of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, perma-

nent mutation, and the intensive and extensive limits of sociological under-

standing) to account for the gaps between the theoretical model and the

practice of agents while providing elements for a sociology of freedom.

Freedom is conceived as the knowledge of constraints (self-objectification

through sociological analysis), as the capacity for self-determination toward

a chosen finality, and as relatively free action despite the obligations that stem

from a given position in the social space. It supposes the dispositional capacity

of the agent but also the configurational (i.e., relative to the field) and situa-

tional (i.e., relative to the concrete interactions that actualize the structure of

the game for the actor) capacity to adopt a free behavior that is probably more

difficult to foresee for his or her partners. At the moral level, freedom

becomes an instrument of struggle against social inequalities, although

Bourdieu is not especially explicit on this subject. In a certain way, liberated

consciousness implies a responsibility before the state of the world. In affirming

that “the distinctiveness of symbolic domination resides precisely in the fact

that it assumes, of those who submit to it, an attitude which challenges the

usual dichotomy of freedom and constraint” and that “the ‘choices’ of habitus

... are accomplished without consciousness or constraint, by virtue of the dis-

positions which, although they are unquestionably the product of social deter-

minisms, are also constituted outside the spheres of consciousness and

constraint,” Bourdieu significantly stresses the importance of the distinction

between freedom before and after sociological consciousness (Bourdieu,

1991a, p. 51).25

It is, for him, the latter that is fundamental for change and

emancipation from social suffering.

Wacquant’s carnal sociology of boxing can be read through a similar prism.

His experimental study highlights the dynamic relation between habitus and

freedom in a concrete case. It shows with particular clarity the stakes involved

in this nexus, the distinction between freedom before and after sociological con-

sciousness, and the conditions of possibility of this consciousness and their

implications for emancipation. These questions are not at the heart of the


analytical agenda pursued by Body and Soul. Nevertheless, as explained at the

beginning of this paper, they are entailed among theoretical issues raised by

the use of the concept of habitus. It is not surprising then that these questions

appear implicitly in Wacquant’s account of the forging of the pugilist.

Although it does not explicitly engage the debates that these questions involve

(e.g., is sociological revelation a sufficient condition for emancipation and the

conquest of freedom?), Body and Soul contains the elements of an answer to

them and a stimulating description of the tension between freedom and habi-

tus at multiple levels. This work experiments with habitus “in the twofold

sense of putting the notion to the test empirically and methodologically”

(Wacquant, 2005, p. 468). It deploys the concept to analyze the pugilistic uni-

verse and, by the same token, it describes concretely how an individual can

shape his dispositions—and how difficult such work of self-making is.

Notes

1. Let me specify, to avoid confusion, that my intention here is not to follow certain

authors who argue that Bourdieu merely reproduced these theories. The rigorous

use of concepts often requires a treatment of the theoretical problems they

involve.

2. Amid an abundant literature on the notion of habitus one could, for example, refer

to the work of Arnou, who shows the central role played by freedom in Thomas

Aquinas’s theory of habitus (Arnou, 1970, 1971).

3. Translator’s note: The 1977 English version of this work (Outline of a Theory of

Practice) differs significantly from the 1972 French original (Esquisse d’une

théorie de la pratique). Where possible, references to this work are noted using

the English pagination, but occasionally it is necessary to refer to the pagination

of the French original. In the latter case, I indicate parenthetically that the trans-

lation given in this article is my own (J.R.).

4. For Bourdieu these elements are position, disposition, trajectory, and capital

(symbolic, cultural, economic, social, relational, linguistic, scholarly, etc.). For

reasons that cannot be explained here, Bourdieu progressively abandons the term

“generative grammar” which he had freely borrowed from Chomsky (see E.

Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 171–172).

5. All the more so in modern societies, where the agent is exposed to a greater variety

of contexts.

6. For a critique of these principles, see Lahire (1999).

7. This expression is borrowed from Kantian schematism.

8. An artifact which itself is the reflection of a scientific practice.

9. Regarding this last point see Lahire (1998).

10. Unlike what certain cursory readings, or readers, suggest, Bourdieu never seeks

to “evacuate” the subject. He merely does not mean “subject” in the usual sense (a

pure, transcendental subject with universal categories, etc.) but rather

… a subject whose categories of perception and thought, whose structures and

schemes that will be used to construct the world, are to a certain extent the structures


of the world in which he or she is. ... Only on the condition of knowing where I am

in this space, which owes something to the fact that I am a point in this space, can I

have some chance of truly being a subject. (Bourdieu, 2002, pp. 25–6)

11. But, by doing this, the analyst exposes him- or herself to the risk of investing elements

into the understanding of practice which, by their virtual character, may prove

inconclusive for the clarification of behaviors. In the same way, generalization

from arrested phases can cause the analyst to omit or neglect the orientation that tem-

poral structuring imposes on behaviors, making the latter seem reversible even

though they seem irreversible to the agents. The synoptic schema’s capacity for

synchronization and generalization makes it possible to explain the coherence of

practices but without taking into account their unpredictability and their rhythm.

12. In the face of these discrepancies, different theoretical options are possible.

Although Bourdieu observes them in his early works on Algeria (Bourdieu &

Sayad, 1964), he notes their greater importance in modern societies, and studies

them especially through the notion of hysteresis and in the theory of fields. After

submitting the model to criticism, Lahire (1998) attempts to refine it by develop-

ing questions that very often are only sketched out: the initiation of embodied

schemes of action, the heterogeneity of processes of socialization, the process of

analogical transfer, and so on. He empirically analyzes these many discrepancies,

dissonances, or paradoxes by (re)centering the line of questioning on the individ-

ual (Lahire, 2004). Martuccelli (1999), for his part, considers that the increase in

these multiple discrepancies proves the model’s inability to grasp modernity.

Rather than a refinement or increased complexity of the model, these studies

plead in favor of displacing the line of questioning, that is, in Kuhnian terms, for

a paradigm shift (see, e.g., Martuccelli, 2005).

13. We can also displace this question of primary and secondary dispositions at the

level of the relation between individual and community:

Individuals internalize the norms of representation and the fundamental beliefs that

constitute the principles of the world view of the communities in which they are

engaged. But, once it becomes disposition, that is, once it is contracted in the form of

an individual law of behavior, this world view acquires, within the individual, a second

incarnation, relatively autonomous compared to the first and therefore not necessarily

following its evolution … because of its autonomy and its specific inertia, this second

incarnation of the instituted rule contributes to the existence and survival of the first,

such that a relation of mutual dependence is established. (E. Bourdieu, 1998, p. 222)

14. Bourdieu (2001) draws on Kabyle tradition for his archaeological explanation of

gender relations. I will not get into a debate here with the highly questionable

approach according to which the ethnographic description of Kabyle society, “a living

reservoir of the Mediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument for dis-

closing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious which survives in the

men and women of our own societies” (see back cover, Bourdieu, 2001).

15. Once again the pugilistic habitus described by Wacquant is a fruitful example:

“Boxing is an individual sport, no doubt among the most individual of all athletic

contests in that it physically puts in play and in danger the body of the solitary

fighter, whose adequate apprenticeship is quintessentially collective” (Wacquant,

2004, p. 16)


16. In the same line of thought, it is highly likely that his experience at the Woodlawn

Boys’ Club affected the ways whereby Wacquant perceives and acts in academe

today.

17. Lahire (1998) has best studied the heterogeneity of socializing experiences and

notably what Bourdieu (1997/2000b) calls “cleft, tormented habitus bearing in the

form of tensions and contradictions the mark of the contradictory conditions of

formation of which they are the product” (p. 64).

18. For a critical reading of Alexander’s incisive work (1995), see Wacquant (2001).

19. On the relation between belief and dispositionalism see E. Bourdieu (1998,

pp. 195–254).

20. According to Lahire (1998), the plural dimension of the actor plays an essential

role in this impression of freedom:

One could say that we are too multisocialized and too multidetermined to be able to

be fully aware of our determinisms. If there were only one force of powerful deter-

minations, which exerted itself on us, then maybe we would have an intuition, even

a vague one, of determinism. (p. 235)

21. His social integration in the gym was not a foregone conclusion. Wacquant

(2005) recounts:

During the first few months of my initiation, Ashante, a hard-nosed welterweight who

later became my regular sparring partner, used to ask the gym’s old coach at what time

“the Frenchie” was coming so that he could arrange to train early, shower, jump back into

his clothes, and then sit in the backroom to laugh at “Mister Magoo” for an hour. (p. 448)

22. We find this distinction between two levels of freedom in Spinoza. He writes in

his famous “Letter to Schuller” (Letter LVIII, October 1674):

I say that that thing is free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own

nature; but that that thing is under compulsion which is determined by something else

to exist, and to act in a definite and determined manner. ... For instance, a stone

receives from an external cause, which impels it, a certain quantity of motion, with

which it will afterwards necessarily continue to move when the impact of the external

cause has ceased. This continuance of the stone in its motion is compelled, not because

it is necessary, but because it must be defined by the impact of an external cause. What

is here said of the stone must be understood of each individual thing, however com-

posite and however adapted to various ends it may be thought to be: that is, that each

thing is necessarily determined by an external cause to exist and to act in a definite

and determinate manner. Next, conceive ... that the stone ... thinks, and knows that it

is striving as much as possible to continue in motion. Surely this stone, inasmuch as it

is conscious only of its own effort, and is far from indifferent, will believe that it is

completely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than because it

wants to. And such is the human freedom which all men boast that they possess, and

which consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire, and ignorant of

the causes by which they are determined. So the infant believes that it freely wants

milk; the boy when he is angry that he freely wants revenge. ... Then too the drunkard

believes that, by the free decision of his mind, he says those things which afterwards

when sober he would prefer to have left unsaid. ... Since this preconception is innate

in all men, they are not so easily freed from it ... yet they believe themselves to be free.

(Spinoza, 1928, pp. 294–296; see also The Ethics, III.2 and V [Spinoza, 1677/1981])


23. For Bourdieu, the agent is moved by a conatus, a tendency to persevere in one’s

being, which inclines him or her to make choices. The agent permanently actualizes,

through practice, a being that fluctuates throughout action and experience and

toward which he or she tends.

24. The “later Bourdieu”’s growing attachment to elaborating of a theory of the field

can also be understood as a way to respond better to situations of discrepancy

between the model and reality. The analysis of situation and context makes it

possible to understand the divergences within habitus that Bourdieu emphasizes

more often in his later works, even though the inertia of habitus always assures it

a certain autonomy relative to context (see, e.g., E. Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 143–148).

25. This last clause follows the previous version of the sentence’s end, before

September 5, 2006: “Bourdieu significantly stresses the importance of the distinction

between freedom prior to and following sociological consciousness.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. The author would like to thank Jonathon Repinecz for

his translation of this article.

MATHIEU HILGERS is Professor of Anthropology at the Free University of

Brussels. His research interests and publications include social sciences

(anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political sciences) and phi-

losophy. He has recently published Une ethnographie à l’échelle de la

ville (Karthala, 2009, English version forthcoming), numerous articles in

international journals, and coordinated journals issues and books,

notably a book on Bourdieu’s fields theory (in press). At a time where

most part of urban research is devoted to the metropolis and global cities

his work seeks to design an anthropology of secondary cities which

focuses on the effects of neoliberalism on popular perceptions of poli-

tics, on identity, and on belonging. His main fieldwork is in Africa but

he also does research in Europe. ADDRESS: ULB-Institut de Sociologie,

Avenue Jeanne, 44 - CP124, B-1050 Bruxelles, Bureau: S12-206, Belgium.

[email: [email protected]]


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Habitus,Freedom ,andReflexivity - lamclamc.ulb.ac.be/IMG/pdf/Habitus_Freedom_and_Reflexivity.pdf · Bourdieu’s treatment of this ... I show the reason for their incompatibility