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History of Bourdieu and reproduction theory

Bourdieu's theories recognizably build upon the conjectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others. Beginning to study socialisation and how dominant culture and certain norms and traditions affected many social relations, Bourdieu's ideas were especially similar to those of Louis Althusser 's notion of Ideological State Apparatuses, which had emerged around the same time. Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticised the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. Playing an essential part in Bourdieu's sociological analysis is what he called symbolic violence: the capacity to ensure that the predictability of the social order is ignored—or mis-recognised as natural—and thus to ensure the legitimacy of social structures.