An upcoming Theory and Society article, written by Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo, urges renewed and revised attention to probability in sociology. This is probability not as we are intellectually most familiar with it (i.e., explicitly calculated as resting somewhere between 0 and 1), but as we–i.e., as people generally–are practically familiar with it. They suggest that probability is often considered to reside solely in the relation between models and the world, leading to the neglect of its presence in the world that these models are build to understand.
Since, they assert, “probability is objective as part of the world”, all sociologists need to concern themselves with it. Not only should it concern so-called “quantitative” sociologists, but it should also concern “qualitative” sociologists, for whom “probability can be qualitatively understood as part of social action and experience”. The latter are charged with explaining how objective probabilities become realized and rendered into actuality.
Strand and Lizardo anticipate resistance to this redrawing of the ordinary separation of methodological labor, and so attempt to smuggle it in under the aegis of a couple of familiar folks: Bourdieu and, by the imprint made on Bourdieu, Weber. Since “sociologists have already been making (perhaps good, perhaps ritualistic) use of Bourdieu’s core concepts, then they are already probabilists in practice”. The bulk of the article concentrates, then, on a reconstruction of the idea of probability in Bourdieu’s oeuvre, focusing on what the authors contend is something of a rupture occurring in 1973, upon Bourdieu’s deployment of Weber’s ideas about probability as they present themselves in a 1913 methodological essay. In this post I am going to show that this is no such rupture, since the notion (of a looping interaction between “objective chances” and “subjective hopes”) they fix upon was already established some years before 1973, with no reference to Weber. Strand and Lizardo’s recommendation that we consider probability as objective, in the world, is a good one, but it stands even in the absence of the intellectual reconstruction they attempt.
Strand and Lizardo argue, basically, that Bourdieu’s useful idea about probability–that, as “objective probability”, it inheres in the world rather than only in representations of the world–is not the idea we usually have about probability, and that he came to it through an encounter with Max Weber. Not only have many missed this current running through Bourdieu’s work (beginning in the early 1970s, when he started writing on Weber), but us Anglophone readers have not even been able to identify its source in Weber, since we have only the methodological work as presented by Shils and Finch (which excluded the crucial essay, “Some categories of interpretive sociology”–originally published in Logos in 1913 as “Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie”). The French, on the other hand, had available to them a 1965 volume, Max Weber: essais sur la théorie de la science (edited by Raymond Aron’s doctoral student, Julien Freund), which contained the essay. By the time this was published in English in 1981, the die had long been cast and this “heterodox” form of probability remained latent.
For Weber, in this essay, social action is ordinarily oriented outward toward the expectations of others’ behavior and inward toward the subjective probability that, given expectations of others’ behavior, one’s own action has more or less chance of success. This chance functions “objectively” as a probability of success. So Weber suggests, as does Bourdieu, that probability is immanent to social action and not just a means of explaining it through statistical procedures. It becomes realized through social action, brought about by subjective anticipation. For Bourdieu, “it’s a fundamental anthropological law that social agents have expectations that are broadly adjusted to their objective chances” (Anthropologie économique: 102). This is made possible because social actors “internalize”, as Bourdieu says, these objective chances through their prolonged engagement with the world and learn what to expect and when, giving subjectivity its content and quality. In Strand and Lizardo’s telling, “probability becomes a qualitatively retrievable part of social action and experience, rather than located only in (or learnable through) an analyst’s calculation”.
They “trace Bourdieu’s adoption of probabilism, [in] a story that hinges as far as we can tell on Bourdieu’s reading of Weber’s 1913 Logos essay sometime in the early 1970s”. In the rest of this post, I want to suggest that Weber’s essay was not a particularly potent source for Bourdieu’s adoption of objective probability, especially since he came to the idea in the 1960s.
First, it should be mentioned that Bourdieu seems to have happened upon this 1913 essay years before the 1970s. While it’s certainly a good idea not to take Bourdieu’s later word for contemporaneous truth, as he later describes it (in 1999) Bourdieu had some difficulty with this “methodological” Weber, on which Strand and Lizardo place so much emphasis: “I learned German and translated entire sections [of The Protestant ethic]. I did not find the French translations, which were published later, particularly helpful; it seemed to me that the German text was much richer, more precise; the first available translations, especially the one of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, conveyed a rather distorted view of Weber’s work” (“With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu” [Schutheis & Pfeuffer: 112]).
According to his later telling, Bourdieu appears to be familiar already in around 1961 with the collection in which Weber’s 1913 essay was published, since he “began to deal with Weber’s writings on science at the Sorbonne [as Aron’s assistant]”. This suggests he didn’t happen upon the article at some point between its translation in 1965 and his 1974 article explicitly citing it. But this is itself not any evidence that the concept of objective probability had a different source. So, if it did not come from Weber, where did it come from?
Though it is improbable that this concept arrived through Bourdieu reading Weber’s 1913 article, this is not to say that Weber exerted no influence. We can trace it through his Algerian writings, beginning with the notion ethos (related to probability as I will show below!), which is linked etymologically with Weber’s Ethik and shares with the latter an emphasis on moral duty. These are morally binding instructions for living–a demand for capital accumulation in Weber’s case–that are opposed to a neutral and technical mode of living that privileges means-end efficiency [Lebenstechnik]). As Bourdieu writes in L’Esquisse, in words likely written in the early 1960s and which he will not include in the 1977 English translation:
Just as ethos and taste (or if you prefer aisthesis) are ethics and aesthetics realized, likewise exis is myth realized, incorporated, rendered into a permanent disposition, a durable way of holding oneself, of speaking, of walking, and, hence, of feeling and thinking
L’Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972: 193)
This suggests an ethical force that is then incorporated and enacted. But how? The notion of ethos–an antecedent of habitus–runs through Bourdieu’s works in the first half of the 1960s. It is essentially a system of values–durable and internalized–that one more-or-less shares with one’s community. He employs it at this time to explain variations in fertility rates, financial behavior and school completion (independent variables are refracted through this moral mediator, permitting him to explain how uniform objective social conditions can result in different outcomes). In Bourdieu and Passeron’s educational sociology, it is most prominent, and this is where we get the idea of objective probability. Essentially, a group’s ethos is linked very closely to what it deems probable. Once again, we return to the idea of the future:
Can that fundamental dimension of class ethos, the attitude to the objective future, be in fact anything but the internalization of the objective future course of events which is gradually brought home to and imposed on every member of a given class by means of the experience of successes and failures?
“The school as a conservative force” (1974 [1966]: 34)
The attitude toward the objective future, then, is fundamental to the class ethos, and this attitude is brought about by the internalization of a course of events (which have not yet occurred, but which it will assist in bringing about…). It imposes itself with moral authority, moreover:
To say, in relation to classical studies in a lycée, for example, that “it’s not for us”, is to say more than “we don’t have the means”. An expression of internalized necessity, this formula is, you could say, in the imperative-indicative, since it simultaneously expresses an impossibility and a prohibition
“L’Ecole conservatrice” (1966: 331)
This “it’s not for us” is the qualitative, categorical form of an objective future, otherwise defined by the continuous probability of succeeding in a given outcome. The very ideas of success and failure–which Bourdieu asserts people and groups experience over time, giving them the feeling for the objective probability of a given outcome–Bourdieu most overtly expresses by drawing on the social psychology of Kurt Lewin. Lewin’s “Time perspective and morale”, as Bourdieu quotes it, declares that individuals will marginally raise their aspiration in proportion to their successes. Likewise, they will lower their aspiration in proportion to their failures. For Bourdieu, “It is quite clear that a circular process occurs”, wherein a group’s aspirations will set the standard for the individual: low group aspirations result in low individual aspirations, in turn resulting in low individual achievements, giving rise in their turn to low group aspirations. Ultimately, “everything conspires to bring back those who, as we say, ‘have no future’ to ‘reasonable’ hopes (or ‘realistic ones’, as Lewin calls them)” (1974 [1966]: 35). Regardless of the soundness of this argument, Bourdieu maintains that these aspiration levels are the result of actual successes and failures, such that there is a correspondence between objective chances or objective probability and their internalized form: aspiration, or “subjective” probability.
A 1968 article (“L’examen d’une illusion”, with the relevant section translated below) makes explicit reference to objective probability and identifies its link to its internalized form, subjective probability. The date of the article is the surest evidence against the claim that Bourdieu happened upon this notion in the early 1970s, under the influence of Weber. In this article, first, we find a proximate term like “objective future”, which is also used in works from the early 1960s.
The fact that “objective future” is found in this earlier period leads Strand and Lizardo to declare it a Husserlian hangover and thus not continuous with the Weberian “objective probability” notion. Yet it is unclear how how an objective future in the sense Bourdieu means it could be an intentional object (in fact, the terminology used in Travail et travailleurs en Algèrie suggests phenomenological “consciousness” in opposition to the “objective”: for example, “unemployment can exist ‘in itself’ without being apprehended by individual or collective consciousness as such” [1963: 304]). Rather, objective future first refers to the future made possible by economic and cultural developments, like the emergence of a capitalist “cosmos”, permitting a particular attitude to the future to arise. In his 1958 Sociologie de l’Algérie, Bourdieu compares the “traditionalist spirit” of rural Algerians to the capitalist one bound up with a complex modern economy, “where the path between the beginning and the end of a production process is extremely long and can only be followed thanks to precise calculations”, making an “abstract and symbolic future” realizable and desirable (1958: 104). In this Weberian contrast, we have the later distinction between the “à-venir” and the “futur”, which would recur throughout Bourdieu’s oeuvre.
Pivotally, this 1968 article treats this “objective future” as almost equivalent to the phrase “objective probability”–with no mention of Weber at all. Bourdieu and Passeron expound upon their idea of objective probability in a long tortuous footnote here, identifying it with the statistical regularities observed by social scientists. Here, the reference is to Henri Poincaré, who distinguished “subjective probability” from objective probability as one distinguishes estimation based on past knowledge from a declaration of the regularities given close and protracted observation of the course of events.
This footnote is mostly reproduced–with Poincaré’s own terminology and his example of a gambler entertaining probabilities–in L’Esquisse (p.177), part of which is translated in a 1973 article that Strand and Lizardo again assign a Weberian influence to. In this latter article, however, the explicit reference is to Cournot, who also used “objective probability” in a proximate enough way to Poincaré. (Cournot is deployed again to illustrate this idea in Bourdieu’s April 26 1984 lecture [2016: 307] and is assigned a similar role, as a flag-bearer of probablism, in Bourdieu’s 1967 “Postface” to his translation of Panofsky’s Gothic architecture and Scholasticism.)
Though the provenance of “objective probability” is unlikely to be found in the influence of Weber alone, in the latter’s work along with that of Poincaré and Cournot, we nevertheless find Strand and Lizardo’s same point that objective probabilities exist in the world.
The question we are left with is if the source of this specific concept of “objective probability” is in Poincaré or Cournot or Lewin rather than Weber–and there is more evidence to suggest at least one of these–then must we choose a different progenitor from among them? I don’t think so. Mostly because the concept has no one origin. Such concepts are almost as flexible in their definitions as they are present in various research projects. This means that Bourdieu draws upon different thinkers at different times to provide terminology through which to express some fledgling notion, which the terminology functions to refine and reconstitute. In this process, the concept becomes progressively layered and heterogeneous, resulting in a polysemous “definition”. Thus the concept resembles at once a Weberian notion, a Lewinian notion, and so on. We could say then that a notion like objective probability in Bourdieu is overdetermined, and it is pointless to search for punctual moments of independent influence. It might have achieved its thematic expression by borrowing a formulation of Poincaré, but this was only possible because of the elective affinity between this notion and Weber’s “spirit”, which Bourdieu had imbibed some time earlier.
I wanted to reproduce a crucial part of this article (“L’examen d’une illusion” [1968: 240-242]), because it contains a thorough working out of the “loop” Strand and Lizardo refer to
…when it comes to explaining that the fraction of the scholarly population that is eliminated before entering secondary school or during this time is not distributed by chance among the different social classes, one is condemned to an explanation by characteristics that remain individual, even if one imputes them equally to all individuals of a category, as long as one does not perceive that they happen to the social class as such only in and by its relationship to the school. Even when it appears as if imposed by the force of the “vocation” or by the observation of unfitness, every single act of choice by which a child is excluded from access to the next grade or resigns himself to relegation into a course of devalorized study, takes into account the whole ensemble of objective relations (which pre-existed this choice and which will survive it) between his social class and the scholarly system, since a scholarly future is more or less probable for a given individual only insofar as it is the objective and collective future of his category. This is why the distribution between the different social classes of objective chances for social ascension and, more precisely, of chances for ascension through the school, conditions attitudes to the school and to ascension through the school, attitudes which contribute in their turn to defining the chances of acceding to the school, of adhering to its norms, and of succeeding there–therefore, the chances of social ascension.1
Thus, the objective probability of acceding to such and such a level of education that is attached to a class constitutes more than a retranslation of the unequal representation of the different classes in a given level of education, a simple mathematical artefact which will permit only to grasp more clearly the real order of magnititude of inequalities. It’s a theoretical construction furnishing one of the most powerful principles of the explanation of these inequalities: the subjective hope of chances of success, which leads a subject to exclude himself, rests on an estimation of the objective probabilities of his category,2 so that it counts among the mechanisms which contribute to the realization of objective probabilities. In other words, the objective effectiveness of objective class probabilities–which are exercised according to the logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy–manifests itself in the objective consequences of the subjective relation to objective probabilities. The notion of subjective hope as objective chance internalized according to a process of internalization regulated by the system of objective relations in which it takes place owes its explanatory force to the fact that, in its very definition, this notion seizes on a node of relations, those which unite the education system and the class system, both apprehended as ensembles of relations among relations and those which are established between the system of these objective relations and each social agent, individual or group, insofar as the latter always takes into account, even without knowing it, when it determines itself, the system of objective relations which determine it. This is because the explanation by the relation between subjective hope and (mathematically calculable) objective probability is in reality an explanation by a system of relations among relations that it can explain facts that are very different at first glance, which generally elicit so many ad hoc explanations, often inspired, in the same author, by contradictory principles as, for example, the scholarly attrition of the working classes (self-elimination being only the anticipated choice of an objective destiny) or the survival of a fraction of these social classes, with the particular modality of the survivors’ attitude in regard to the system, or still the different attitudes of the students from different classes regarding labor and scholarly results according to the degree of probability and improbability of their continuing a given cycle of studies.
- In the language employed here, subjective probability and objective probability are distinguished as the point of view of the subject and the point of view of the scholar [savant], who constructs the objective regularities through equipped observation. From the point of view of sociological explanation, this distinction is more pertinent than that which certain statisticians make between a posteriori (or ex post) probability, formulated on the past and beginning from the experience of the past, and a priori (or ex ante) probability, which is anyway better labelled a priori – a posteriori, since it involves the estimation of the probability of a future event founded on the knowledge of the past, but which can be verified, invalidated or corrected in its turn, and therefore becomes an ex post probability, that is to say, observed and observable. The traditional definition of notions of objective probability and subjective probability as well as the notions of a priori probabilities and a posteriori probability can be found in Poincaré, La science et l’hypothèse (1902, p.229 and pp.247-250). Like objective (or scientific) probability, subjective probability (or lived expectation/aspiration/hope [espérance vécue]) is at once turned towards the past (since it rests on a global appreciation of past events) and towards the future (since it constitutes an estimation of chances of events to come). We wanted to show here that objective regularities are internalized in the form of subjective expectations [espérances] and that the latter are expressed in objective behaviors which contribute to the realization of objective probabilities. Consequently, depending on whether one adopts the point of view of the explanation of behaviors beginning from probabilities or the point of view that forecasts the probable by beginning from behaviors, one is led to privilege in this dialectic the first relation or the second.↩︎
- For an analysis of the logic of the process of internalization, which culminates in objective chances transmuted into subjective hopes or despair and, more generally of the mechanisms evoked above, see “L’Ecole conservatrice” (1966)
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