Neoconservative reads radical French social theorist: NY Times columnist David Brooks on Pierre Bourdieu

Comment published in reply to Times opinion writer David Brooks, “Getting radical about inequality,” New York Times, July 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/inequality-pierre-bourdieu.html?comments#commentsContainer

Brooks's eloquent and sympathetic summary of the thought of the renowned late French left-wing sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reduces it to a description of a certain mode of thinking that Marxists would rightly call "petty bourgeois" (the point of view of the entrepreneur we are all now expected to be, particularly in marketing ourselves) and befitting our neoliberal (yet still Hobbesian) world of "every man for himself." Here, people are seen as mainly interested in individual success in a marketplace writ large and total. The suspicion that all this jockeying for prestige and the legitimated exercise of class privilege and domination reduces to the desire for success may be what suggests Brooks's adoption of a moral rather than social scientific or theoretical point of view. Yet, such reflexes often stem from a failure to glimpse a forward path to alternatives. That condition has become near universal today, but it remains a contingency and a field of problems to be solved. Morals are great but alone they won't quite cut it here. Far from only having evils to denounce, even with neoliberalism's latest avatar in the White House, what we really have is problems to be solved. And the present administration and most of the media are not interested.