On the state : lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992 / Pierre Bourdieu ; edited by Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau, and Marie-Christine Rivière ; translated by David Fernbach.

Translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Year 1989-1990: -- Lecture of 18 January 1990: -- An inconceivable object -- The state as neutral site -- The Marxist tradition -- The calendar and the structure of temporality -- State categories -- Acts of state -- The private housing market and the state -- The 'Barre commission' on housing -- Lecture of 25 January 1990: -- The theoretical and the empirical -- State commissions and productions -- The social construction of public problems -- The state as viewpoint of viewpoints -- Official marriage -- Theory and theory effects -- The two meanings of the word 'state' -- Transforming the particular into the universal -- The obsequium -- Institutions as 'organized trustee' -- Genesis of the state.

Difficulties of the undertaking -- Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology -- Lecture of 1 February 1990: -- The rhetoric of the official -- The public and the official -- The universal other and censorship -- The 'legislator as artist' -- The genesis of public discourse -- Public discourse and imposition of form -- Public opinion -- Lecture of 8 February 1990: -- The concentration of symbolic resources -- Sociological reading of Franz Kafka -- An untenable research programme -- History and sociology -- Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt's The Political Systems of Empires -- Perry Anderson's two books -- The problem of Barrington Moore's 'three roads' -- Lecture of 15 February 1990: -- The official and the private -- Sociology and history: genetic structuralism -- Genetic history of the state -- Game and field -- Anachronism and illusion of the nominal -- The two faces of the state -- Year 1990-1991: -- Lecture of 10 January 1991: -- Historical approach and genetic approach -- Research strategy -- Housing policy -- Interactions and structural relations -- Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization -- The effect of 'that's the way it isÉ' and the closing of possibilities -- The space of possibilities -- The example of spelling -- Lecture of 17 January 1991: -- Reminder of the course's procedure -- The two meanings of the word 'state': state as administration, state as territory -- The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle -- Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias -- Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly -- Lecture of 24 January 1991: -- Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint -- Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer -- The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms -- Lecture of 31 January 1991: -- Reply to questions -- Cultural archaisms and economic transformations -- Culture and national unity: the case of Japan -- Bureaucracy and cultural integration -- National unification and cultural domination -- Lecture of 7 February 1991: -- Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power -- Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning -- The state as producer of principles of classification -- Belief effect and cognitive structures -- The coherence effect of state symbolic systems -- The school timetable as a state construction -- The producers of doxa -- Lecture of 14 February 1991: -- Sociology, an esoteric science with an exoteric air -- Professionals and lay people -- The state structures the social order -- Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy -- Transmutation of private into public: the appearance of the modern state in Europe -- Lecture of 21 February 1991: -- Logic of the genesis and emergence of the state: symbolic capital -- The stages of the process of concentration of capital -- The dynastic state -- The state as a power over powers -- Concentration and dispossession of kinds of capital: the example of physical force capital -- Constitution of a central economic capital and construction of an autonomous economic space -- Lecture of 7 March 1991: -- Reply to questions: conformity and consensus -- Concentration processes of the kinds of capital: resistances -- The unification of the legal market -- The constitution of an interest in the universal -- The state viewpoint and totalization: informational capital -- Concentration of cultural capital and national construction -- 'Natural nobility' and state nobility -- Lecture of 14 March 1991: -- Digression: a forcible intervention in the intellectual field -- The double face of the state: domination and integration -- Jus loci and jus sanguinis -- The unification of the market in symbolic goods -- Analogy between the religious field and the cultural field -- Year 1991-1992: -- Lecture of 3 October 1991: -- A model of the transformations of the dynastic state -- The notion of reproduction strategies -- The notion of a system of reproduction strategies -- The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies -- The 'king's house' -- Legal logic and practical logic of the dynastic state -- Objectives of the next lecture -- Lecture of 10 October 1991: -- The 'house' model versus historical finalism -- The issues in historical research on the state -- The contradictions of the dynastic state -- A tripartite structure -- Lecture of 24 October 1991: -- Recapitulation of the logic of the course -- Family reproduction and state reproduction -- Digression on the history of political thought -- The historical work of lawyers in the process of state construction -- Differentiation of power and structural corruption: an economic model -- Lecture of 7 November 1991: -- Preamble: the difficulties of communication in social science -- The example of institutionalized corruption in China: 1) the ambiguous power of sub-bureaucrats -- The example of institutionalized corruption in China: 2) the 'pure' -- The example of institutionalized corruption in China: 3) double game and double 'I' -- The genesis of the bureaucratic space and the invention of the public -- Lecture of 14 November 1991: -- Construction of the republic and construction of the nation -- The constitution of the public in the light of an English treatise on constitutional law -- The use of royal seals: the chain of guarantees -- Lecture of 21 November 1991: -- Reply to a question on the public/private contrast -- The transmutation of private into public: a non-linear process -- The genesis of the meta-field of power: differentiation and dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic authorities -- A research programme on the French Revolution -- Dynastic principle versus legal principle: the lit de justice as case study -- Methodological digression: the kitchen of political theories -- Legal struggles as symbolic struggles for power -- The three contradictions of lawyers -- Lecture of 28 November 1991: -- History as an issue of struggle -- The legal field: a historical approach -- Functions and functionaries -- The state as fictio juris -- Legal capital as linguistic capital and practical control -- Lawyers in confrontation with the church: a corporation acquires autonomy -- Reformation, Jansenism and legalism -- The public: an unprecedented reality in constant development -- Lecture of 5 December 1991: -- Programme for a social history of political ideas and the state -- The interest in disinterestedness -- Lawyers and the universal -- The (false) problem of the French Revolution -- The state and the nation -- The state as 'civil religion' -- Nationality and citizenship: contrast between the French and German models -- Struggles of interest and struggles of unconscious in political debate -- Lecture of 12 December 1991: -- Construction of the political space: the parliamentary game -- Digression: television in the new political game -- From the paper state to the real state -- Domesticating the dominated: the dialectic of discipline and philanthropy -- The theoretical dimension of state construction -- Questions for a conclusion.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions.