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Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, by Pierre Bourdieu. Translated by Loïc Wacquant. New York: The New Press, 2003. Paper, $14.95. Pp. 96.
When he died in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu was widely considered to be one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century. In France, his books like The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Modern Society, On Television, and Masculine Domination were best sellers, and Bourdieu had become an outspoken critic of "globalization," neoliberal economic policies, and the effects of these on culture, politics, and everyday life.
Firing Back is a companion piece to Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Like that first slender volume, Firing Back consists of a series of public talks opposing "the imposition on the entire world of the neoliberals' tyranny of the market and the undisputed rule of the economy and of economic powers, within which the United States occupies a dominant position" (9). Eschewing the belief that scientists who directly engage in political debate have somehow compromised their integrity, Bourdieu makes a passionate case for the dire need to bring scientific expertise and scientific discussion into public view.
Three central themes run throughout the essays that comprise this volume. The first is a scathing critique of the rhetoric of "globalization" - a discourse that, as Bourdieu repeatedly reminds us, conceals political leaders' freedom of choice behind a kind of economic fatalism. The rhetoric of "globalization" hides the very realities of neoliberal economic policies: casualization of labor, the destruction of the social state and all the consequences that follow from this (an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor; significant effects on...