Geoffrey Hawthorn

No theorist of what only a theorist would dare to call ‘modern society’ commands more attention in the anglophone world; no one is closer to the centre of the local ‘field of power’, as he would describe it, that is Parisian intellectual life. Pierre Bourdieu’s first book, his 1958 ethnography of the Kabyle of Algeria, was, it’s true, social anthropology done in the British manner: it talked of the social functions of ‘solidarity’. But even as he finished it, Bourdieu was being drawn to the very different theory of ‘practical ensembles’ that Sartre was directing against the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the French Communist Party. His essays on Algeria in the early Sixties talked of a ‘solidarity’ fashioned in more adversarial circumstances. At the same time, Louis Althusser was trying to revive the Party’s materialism with his notion of the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ that did capitalism’s work with powers that were distinctively their own. Bourdieu was drawn by this, too. In 1972, he recast his thoughts on the Kabyle in a discernibly Althusserian Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Five years later, in a revised English edition of that book, he settled on the view of what shapes social practices that has since guided his writings on class, education, post-Romantic art and the theory and practice of sociology itself.

Fifteen thousand candidates contested 545 seats in the Indian lower house, the Lok Sabha, in the May General Election. Four hundred million of the 590 million who were eligible to do so voted. It was the largest election in history. Yet it might have seemed odd. The Congress Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms. But the economy was not discussed. India has more than a third of the world’s poor. But poverty was not an issue. Congress’s secularism has been challenged by ‘Hindu fundamentalists’. But the Bharatiya Janata, the Party that’s been mounting the challenge, scarcely mentioned religion. The quarrels were more political than religious, and even where candidates from Congress itself were concerned, largely local and particular.

One of the more unusual companies in the British register has done what it set out to do. ‘Buntings and New World warblers’, the ninth and last and, at fewer than five hundred pages, much the shortest of its volumes of Birds of the Western Palaearctic, is out. Some wonder whether Western Palaearctic Birds Ltd might not have overdone it. Birding World, the magazine for the seriously obsessed, had already asked in 1992, when Volume VI was published, what anyone could do with the information that the Marsh Warbler–admittedly difficult to distinguish by sight alone–has been heard to go tchre(k), tek, tic, tchick, thec, tchuk and tuk, chrah, chah, chaar, tschaah, kärr-kärr and schräää schräää, tic-trrrr, tic-tirric, tec-krrret, trt schräit and tschätsch-tschätsch, tut t-t-t-trrrrr and tut-ut tut t-t-t-rrr. (And that’s not counting those in the separate section on ‘other calls’.) Who might want to know such things, and why?’

John Searle is in a café in Paris. The waiter arrives. ‘Un demi,’ Searle asks, ‘Munich, à pression, s’il vous plaît.’ The waiter brings the beer. Searle drinks it, puts a few francs on the table, and leaves. ‘An innocent scene’, he agrees, ‘but its metaphysical complexity is truly staggering, and its complexity would have taken Kant’s breath away if he had ever bothered to think about such things.’ Kant didn’t think about such things because, at the time, philosophers were obsessed with knowledge. ‘Much later,’ Searle observes, ‘for a brief, glorious moment, they were obsessed with language. Now this philosopher at least is obsessed with certain general structures of human culture.’

Skill had been killing Formula One. In the early Nineties, Frank Williams and Renault had together been producing cars that were superior to the rest. The superior drivers wanted to be in them. Williams made more money, and their cars got better. The result was increasingly predictable processions round the circuits. Nigel Mansell won the championship in a Williams-Renault in 1992, Alain Prost in 1993. The interest in the past thirty races or more had been reduced to seeing whether McLaren or Ferrari or Benetton could change their tyres more quickly, and how many of those jostling in inferior vehicles at the back hit each other, ran off or broke down. The television audiences, which had risen to extraordinary heights by the mid-Eighties, were falling. Bernie Ecclestone, vice-president of the controlling Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, was said to be determined to stem the loss of income. Last year, Max Mosley, the FIA’s president, announced some changes. Williams’s advantages, which only one or two other teams could afford to emulate, would go. There was to be no more electronically controlled suspension to keep the cars level over bumpy tracks, no more traction control to stop their wheels spinning at the start or in the wet, no more automatic boosts to the throttle during gear changes, no more anti-lock brakes, and no more telemetry to allow technicians to adjust running cars from the pit. The top teams were furious. The rest were delighted. Competition, it seemed, might return to the track.