Introduction

Studies and research centered on Pierre Bourdieu continue to occupy a major place in Brazilian sociology, in particular when it comes to Sociology of Education, but also in numerous other areas of knowledge (more recently including the Exact Sciences), corroborating the scale and scope of his work (NOGUEIRA, 2002; ^{OLIVEIRA; SILVA, 2021}). However, his work at the Collège de France has figured in a secondary way in the literature, usually brought up to ratify his prestigious position within the French scientific field and demonstrating his public practice through political interventions in social life. Taking into account, as ^{Sallaz (2020)} points out, that Bourdieu took this opportunity to bring sociology to the “stages”, as well as his important contributions derived from the interventions that took shape there between 1982 and 2001, the present article analyzes his first course at the Collège de France, titled “General Sociology”, which took place between 1982 and 1986.

It is interesting to note that, throughout his years at the Collège de France, Bourdieu taught several courses that were mostly thematic; there were also years in which it did not occur, such as between 1986 and 1987, and between 1994 and 1995. Between 1987 and 1992, Bourdieu taught a course on the State; between 1992 and 1993, on the social foundations of economic actions; between 1993 and 1994, on the economy of symbolic goods; between 1995 and 1996, on some properties of cultural production fields; between 1996 and 1997, on reasons and history; between 1997 and 1998, on Domination; and between 1998 and 1999, on recent research of the fields. The diversity of themes addressed over the years reflects the eclecticism and scale of Bourdieu’s intellectual project.

It is important to realize that the insertion of Bourdieu as professor of sociology at the Collège de France proved fundamental for the consolidation of his position in the French academic field. As ^{Lahire (2005)} points out, it is evident that Bourdieu perceived that he had enemies, but not adversaries, given that he “owned” a journal of his own, a collection⁴, a research center, received the Gold Medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and was for more than twenty years the only professor of sociology at the Collège de France; such conditions put him in a unique position in the French scientific field.

In 2020, with the publication of the eight lectures of the first year of this course in Brazil – by Editora Vozes, under the title Sociologia geral: lutas de classificação: curso no Collège de France (1981-1982) v. 1 –, a broader contingent of Brazilian researchers started to have access to the content of the lectures given in the first five years in which Bourdieu occupied the Chair of Sociology in the institution, which rekindled the debate about this moment of his work⁵. Our general objective, therefore, is in two complementary fronts, namely: to explain the paths and main themes that characterized that first course, as well as to understand Bourdieu in his professorship, in the condition of Chair, and how this position allowed him to treat his work in a different way, with the intentionality that is characteristic of the teaching practice. Our objective is to analyze Bourdieu’s performance not only as a researcher, but also as a professor, and from there we seek to understand his conception of sociology.

From a qualitative study of a bibliographic nature, this article features dialogues with national and international authors and an analysis of Bourdieu’s General Sociology course. In the first section, we concentrate on the intellectual scene around the Collège de France with the purpose of highlighting the significance of Pierre Bourdieu’s selection for the Chair of Sociology; in the second section, we deal more closely with the first course that Bourdieu taught in this institution, with a privileged space for his inaugural lecture and for the five years of interventions called General Sociology course. In general, the study demonstrates the relevance of translating this course to portuguese for the Brazilian public, considering it ended up recentralizing the debate on the roles of sociology and sociologists, in a movement of reflexivity so dear to Bourdieu; it also reaffirms the analytical power of his lectures, seeing as they reveal his professorial intentionalities in the sense of understanding his thought and the issues he faced and began to share with peers from the Collège de France.

The vicissitudes of the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France

Firstly, in order to understand the relevance of thinking about Bourdieu’s practice at the Collège de France, it is necessary to bear in mind that this is deemed the highest place of consecration in the French academic field (^{FEUERHAHN, 2017}), so occupying this space is considered an objective aspiration of francophone intellectuals. The prestige dimension of this academic position can be expressed by naming some of those that have taught at this institution: Lucien Febvre, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Veyne, Fernand Braudel, Claude Levi-Strauss, Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier, among others.

Often, when talking about this institution, it stands out, on the one hand, its longevity, since it was built in 1531 by Francisco I (1494-1547); on the other, the idiosyncrasy of its organization and operation. Strictly speaking, the Collège de France has listeners as opposed to students, seeing as there are no questions since professors give out lectures in conferences, nor do people who attend lectures undergo attendance control or exams, and professors have the obligation to present a new course each year. It is also important to mention that:

The chairs of the Collège can be altered by the Assembly of Professors each time one of them is vacant, and are redefined for the new holder in a two-stage voting process. In the first stage, the Assembly defines the title of the Chair to replace it. Then, with the re-creation of the chair and the declaration of vacancy, the Assembly elects the holder. In practice, “the chair is created for a specific predetermined candidate, with the second stage working as a mere formality”. It should be noticed that no university degree is required of the candidates, and they are evaluated based on the importance and originality of their work (^{CATANI, 2017}, p. 124-125).

This means that there is not necessarily a continuity with respect to certain scientific fields, which may have their Chairs discontinued. The Chair of Sociology, for example, initially operated from 1931 to 1942, under the responsibility of sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), and between 1970 and 1978 the Chair of Sociology of Modern Civilizations was also active, organized by Raymond Aron (1905-1983), which was then reordered as Sociology between 1981 and 2001 by Bourdieu. There were also specific sociology professorships, such as Muslim Sociology and Sociography, between 1902 and 1925, organized by Alfred Le Chatelier (1855-1929), and later by Louis Massignon (1883-1962), between 1926 and 1954; Muslim Sociology, which functioned between 1956 and 1976, with Professor Henri Laoust (1905-1983); and more recently, in 2013, the chair of Sociology of Creative Work was created, headed by Pierre-Michel Menger.

Usually, going from professor to Chair involves not only evident academic prestige, but also considerable political and social capital. Some professors made more than one attempt until they became Chairs, eventually in separate professorships. Marcel Mauss, for example, presented himself for Chair of History of Religions in 1907, having come second after Albert Reville (1826-1906). Later, at the assembly of november 23, 1930, his name was approved for the Chair of Sociology, followed by Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) in second place.

The Chair of Sociology created in 1930 originates from the vacancy of the chair of Social Philosophy, which functioned between 1897 and 1929, commanded by Jean Izoulet (1854-1929) until his death. There were certainly doubts whether Mauss would be the best candidate for the Chair of Sociology, since a Chair of Ethnography or Ethnology could be more suitable for his profile (^{FOURNIER, 1996}).

In the process of creating the Chair of Sociology, Charles Andler (1866-1933) offered a report in his favor, in which he decisively emphasized the centrality and relevance of the Durkheimian school, thus reinforcing Mauss’ place in this process, even stating that Mauss was “better equipped” than his uncle, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). The titles of Marcel Mauss were presented by Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935). Mauss’ “lawyers” in this process were his long-time friends, who attested not only to the relevance of the Chair of Sociology for the Collège de France, but to Mauss’s relevance for this space.

Curiously, Halbwachs himself – who came in second in the election that chose Mauss – became a professor at the Collège de France when Mauss retired. The chair, however, was reorganized as Collective Psychology, functioning between 1944 and 1945. When recalling his campaign for this institution, the importance of having the right contacts, conversations and transits with the teachers of the institution was evident. ^{Halbwachs (2001)} narrates the numerous dialogues he conducted, demonstrating the relevance of these extra-academic elements in the field.

Sociology would not have a Chair again at the Collège de France until 1970, with Raymond Aron, and it was actually named Sociology of Modern Civilization, with a proposition approved in the assembly of November 30, 1969, whose report for creation was defended by Robert Minder (1902-1950). To some extent we could even point out the redundancy, since, for some sociologists, sociology differs from other social theories precisely because it turns to modern societies (^{GIDDENS, 1991}), even though this is a conception of the discipline that is mainly consolidated after the 1930s (^{CONNELL, 2019}). However, it is possible to perceive a movement of demarcation of specificity of the Chair, both in relation to the course previously offered by Mauss, and in relation to that conducted by Laoust on Muslim Sociology, which was active until 1976. It is interesting to note that on April 12, 1970, the Assembly of Professors approved Raymond Aron in first place for this Chair, with Francois Bourricaud (1922-1991) in second place, a specialist in Talcott Parsons (1902-1979); still in this Assembly, in the first place for Chair of History of Systems of Thought was Michel Foucault (1926-1984), with Gerard Lebrun (1930-1999) approved in second place. The theme chosen by ^{Aron (1971)} for his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was “The historical condition of the sociologist”, in reference to classical sociologists such as Durkheim, Marx and Weber. Aron defines sociology as the science of modern societies.

It is important to mention that Bourdieu and Aron had important collaborations in previous years, especially the foundation, in 1960, of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (CSE). This is an institution of which Bourdieu was secretary-general until 1969, when, after the events of May 1968, he parted with his master and founded the Centre de Sociologie de L’Éducation et de la Culture (CSEC), reflecting a rather heretical stance in a period of a deeply orthodox model of academic excellence (^{JOLY, 2015}). Despite the rupture between these two great sociologists, we can say that the fact that they both took up the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France demarcates a certain academic lineage in this space.

It was only in 1981 that the Chair of Sociology would return to the Collège de France, having been proposed by Andre Miquel (1929-), who also made the presentation and defense of Bourdieu’s candidacy in the assembly that would choose the professor. In the end, Bourdieu was elected in first place and Luc Boltanski in second. At the time, his main works could be grouped into two categories: Algeria, and Cultural and educational democratization, also highlighting the publications in 1979 of “Distinction” and in 1980 of “Practical Reason” (^{FRINGANT, 2019}). In the next section, we look more closely at Bourdieu’s General Sociology course, carried out between 1982 and 1986, which by the widest scope was substantially distinguished from others he carried out on the State (1987-1992); the Social Foundations of Economic Action (1992-1993); the Economy of Symbolic Goods (1993-1994); Some Properties of the Field of Cultural production (1995-1996); 1998-2000); or on the Science of Science (2000-2001).

Bourdieu, the Professor: the first course at the Collège de France

The didactic intention, which is characteristic of the pedagogical relationship and is at the basis of the act of teaching, is a trademark of the courses that Pierre Bourdieu taught at the Collège de France. This teaching condition granted the sociologist a specific handling of his own work during the almost twenty years he spent as the head Chair of Sociology. Among the apparent antinomies between humility and presumption and between teaching and research, Bourdieu recognizes in the lecture of April 28, 1982 that he would not in fact be the best person to offer a course on his own work, since he would be surrounded by the complexity of research and the simplification that is imposed by the teaching exercise (^{BOURDIEU, 2020}) – which leads him to deconstruct the concept of a course, desacralizing the symbolic weight that we socially attribute to it. However, Bourdieu’s own conceptual tools is what allows us to understand that this artifice works to mitigate the position of prestige and academic authority that his investiture in the scientific playing field was occupying.

On the antinomy between research and teaching claimed by Bourdieu at the beginning of his practice as Chair, Marcel Fournier, his doctoral advisor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, reports that Bourdieu nurtured two projects: his academic project was to train the best sociologists in the world, while his intellectual project consisted of elaborating a theory of practice. To this end, reflexivity was consolidated as a path and Bourdieu continued injecting questions and comments into his own work during lectures, seminars and meetings with mentees. His courses were a kind of laboratory and his objective was the exercise of transmitting to his students the habitus of a rigorous, serious researcher who uses teamwork to correlate the comings and goings between theory and empirical research (FOURNIER, 2002). This way of looking at his teaching practice allows us to understand the directions given to his first years working at the Collège de France.

For his first course at this institution, Bourdieu assumes the task of outlining the fundamental contours of his work and, under the title of Cours de Sociologie générale, develops five years of lectures around the concept and functions of constructs such as field, habitus, motivation and determination of practices, different species of capitals, all addressed as concrete expressions for a problem around which the course is centered: the relationship between the scientific subject (as a cognoscent subject) and its object (which, in the case of sociology, is a set of agent subjects). In this way, it is evident that the concern with scientific reflexivity (Sociology of Sociology or Science of Science) – which would become the central theme of his last course at the Collège de France (2000-2001) – crosses the different reflections that take shape in his practice as professor of Sociology from his very first course.

^{Lebaron (2017)} asserts that the years at the Collège de France consolidated Pierre Bourdieu as a public intellectual, reaffirming that his intellectual relevance was expressed, in addition to publications and translations from this experience, in the numerous public that crowded his lectures in the two decades he taught there. In his inaugural address, Bourdieu already announced his critical tone with a sociological analysis of the inaugural lecture itself and the prestigious position and academic authority that he was then occupying at the Collège de France, which meant a recognition of his legitimacy in the French scientific field, guaranteeing a prominent place for his discourses on sociology and the work of sociologists, as described in the following subsection.

Inaugural lecture, or Leçon sur la leçon

Marking the beginning of his practice as the Chair of Sociology on April 23, 1982, Pierre Bourdieu delivered his inaugural address at the Collège de France, and the way he titled this lecture – Leçon sur la leçon - clues the audience as to the “heresies” that would characterize his speech. Exploring the legitimate scientific position that he had come to occupy with that lecture, he used the moment to defend, as ^{Wacquant (2002)} corroborates, a reflective social science that has control over its own biases and remains independent of the rites of institutions. In a rhetoric about the lesson of the inaugural lecture, and “[...] practicing the sociology of sociology he analyzes the sociological discourse from the position occupied in the structure of the cultural field by the sociologist who produces it” (^{CATANI, 2008}, p. 48). Bourdieu states at the beginning of his speech:

Rite of aggregation and endowment, the inaugural lecture, inceptio, symbolically performs the act of delegation at the end of which the new master is authorized to speak with authority by instituting his word in legitimate discourse, pronounced by those entitled. The properly magical efficacy of the ritual rests in the silent and invisible exchange between the newly admitted, who publicly offers his word, and the assembled sages who by their physical presence attest that this word, thus received by the most imminent masters, becomes universally acceptable, that is, in a strong, masterful sense. (^{BOURDIEU, 1996}, p. 7).

His intention was to demonstrate that the propositions that sociology enunciates about the social world must be applied to the subject who practices science. Starting from a sociological understanding of the inaugural lecture itself indicates his intellectual exercise to demarcate the rituals on which power relations are based on within the scientific field, rituals that end up naturalizing institutional strength, the idea of the sage and social determinism in science. For Bourdieu, one does not enter sociology without tearing up adhesions and subscriptions to groups, beliefs and ties of social affiliation, therefore he also states in the inaugural lecture that it is not possible to speak of an epistemological critique separate from a social critique. Unveiling the mechanisms of domination, the sociology of sociology makes it possible, for the professor, to take the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate representation of the social world as a crucial object for the consolidation of a sociological office that goes beyond the arbitrary divisions of the social order.

The struggle around classifications in the social sciences, by constituting itself as a dimension of every type of class struggle, is distinguished from biological taxonomies precisely by the property of objectifying subjects. In this sense, Bourdieu demonstrates in his inaugural lecture that the classification criteria used by the sociologist are themselves a product of the history of these symbolic struggles and, in this dialectical relationship, contribute to the production of the very reality that they help to think (BOURDIEU, 1996), either in the sense of the bases for their endorsement or for social change.

His lecture on the lecturing, that is, his reflexive exercise in this inaugural class, corroborated his position of breaking with orthodoxy within sociology, which allowed him once again to affirm the importance of cultivating doubt and the need to put oneself outside the law so strongly instituted in the scientific playing field. However, precisely because of this critical self-reflection of the scientific field and the cleaved habitus of Bourdieu – who, prior to taking up the Chair of Sociology, felt unworthy of this prestigious position due to his social origin –, the preparation of the inaugural lecture triggered sleepless nights, as he describes in Sketch for a Self-Analysis (^{BOURDIEU, 2005}), and the moment of giving the lecture was also not a tranquil one. ^{Astorga (1987)} reports that in Pierre Bourdieu’s inaugural lecture there were television cameras, professors and researchers of the Collège de France and a heterogeneous and cosmopolitan public aged between 25 and 70 years or more; after announcing himself as the newest professor, Bourdieu begins to read his text, but his initial nervousness is visible. In the words of Bourdieu himself almost two decades later, when analyzing his own intellectual path and insertion in the scientific field, it is possible to understand the reasons for this tension:

Finally, I thought I saw a way out of the contradiction into which I was thrown by the very fact of a social consecration which assaulted my self-image: to take as the object of my lecture the idea of delivering an inaugural lecture, of performing a rite of institution, thus setting up a distance from the role in the very exercise of the role. But I had underestimated the violence of what, in place of a simple ritual address, became a kind of ‘intervention’ in the artists’ sense. To describe the rite while performing the rite is to commit the supreme social barbarism, that of wilfully suspending belief or, worse, calling it into question and threatening it in the very time and place where it is supposed to be celebrated and strengthened. I thus discovered, in the moment of doing this, that what had become for me a psychological solution constituted a challenge to the symbolic order, an affront to the dignity of the institution which demands that one keep silent about the arbitrariness of the institutional rite that is being performed. The public reading of that text which, written outside the situation, still had to be read as it stood, without modification, before the assembled body of masters, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Michel Foucault and others, was a terrible ordeal. People told me later that my voice was toneless. I was on the point of breaking off and leaving the rostrum. Jean-Pierre Vernant gave me a severe look, or so it seemed: I read on to the end, for better or worse. (^{BOURDIEU, 2005}, p. 131-132).

The transgression he proposed with the writing of the inaugural lecture, for Bourdieu, turned more into a kind of gaffe. This is how he begins his work at the Collège de France, with a critical tone to orthodox knowledge and in defense of freedom in scientific practice – the curious thing here is exactly the paradoxical condition that Bourdieu experiences with the content and intentionality of this inaugural lecture: to use the authority that was conferred to him as a professor to offer a leçon (the French term helps to maintain the double meaning of lecture and lesson/teaching) about freedom before all lessons. Having this in mind let us then dedicate ourselves to the first course Bourdieu taught at the Collège de France.

Cours de sociologie générale I, II, III, IV and V

If in later courses at the Collège de France Bourdieu dealt with more specific themes and objects (the State, Art and the Science of Science), in his General Sociology course we find Bourdieu concerned with the consolidation and dissemination of a way of thinking sociology, an undertaking that was carried out from the main concepts built by him in investigations carried out until the 1980s. The contributions contained in this course of general sociology have been poorly explored in recent decades, since, despite the fact that the Collège de France itself makes the abstracts of each year available on its electronic page⁶, in France the course was only fully published in 2015, with lectures from 1981 to 1983 compiled by the publisher Raisons d’agir, which was eventually complemented by a second volume with lectures from 1983 to 1986 in 2016. It is worth noting that in addition to the abstracts, there are also congresses and missions that Bourdieu participated in during the period, and publications that include translations of his works abroad.

Before entering the specifics of each academic year, let us observe the whole of the course in question:

Five days after his inaugural lecture, which is analyzed in the previous topic, Pierre Bourdieu begins his foray as a professor at the Collège de France and in his first academic year he taught eight lectures between April and June of 1982. This first year of the course was built on the premise that it is necessary to address the relationship between the social scientist and his object of investigation – the subjects who act in society –, which Bourdieu approached based on the classification process that this scientist carries out in his craft, and that necessarily correlates with the classifications that social agents employ in the day-to-day of social life. This means that different classifications coexist in society, and it is necessary to understand the specifics of the classifications of sociology in relation to broader social classifications, but also in relation to other areas of knowledge. The task Bourdieu was facing here, and consequently his audience as well, consisted in overcoming the intellectualist, objectivist and scholastic perspective, questioning the practice of theorizing about the world and social agents (^{FRINGANT, 2019}).

In a progressive movement of knowledge, the first year of the course resumes this issue of classifications and social classes – which were already central in Distinction –, demonstrating that, by presenting his sociology at the Collège de France, Bourdieu promoted a gradual refinement of concepts dear to his theoretical constructs (^{CHAMPAGNE; DUVAL, 2020}). Unlike the classification promoted by biology, an area often cited by the professor to counter sociology, the second works with institutions or individuals which are already classified; they

[ ... ] bear names and titles that signal their membership of certain classes and give us an idea of how we classify in everyday life. If what the sociologist encounters comes in already classified form, it is because classifying subjects are involved. (^{BOURDIEU, 2020}, p. 26).

These names and titles, or rather, these signals are made almost invisible in the process of distinction and social domination, and it is precisely this understanding that leads Bourdieu to affirm in this first year of the course that the problem of classification has, as its background, the issue of the foundation of authority. In this sense, as important as understanding the correlation between classification and authority is the discovery of classification criteria. With examples from works of research, the lectures of that first year built the important understanding that sociology must encompass, in the theory of the social world, a theory of the effect of theory, which, by seeing the world under its specific lenses, contributes to the reality of that same world.

In the first two years of his course, therefore, Bourdieu dedicated himself to going deeper on issues that are featured in some of his works published in the 1960s, but above all in the works more contemporary to these early years at the Collège de France (Distinction, The Practical Reason and The Economics of Language Exchange). To complete this exercise, the investigations he was developing by then also gained space in the debates promoted during those lectures – ^{Champagne and Duval (2020)} point out that Bourdieu cites, in these first years of lectures, for example, his work in progress on university professors (which would become the original work Homo academicus, published in 1980), the Grandes Écoles (The State Nobility, from 1989) and the literary field (The Rules of Art, from 1992). In this sense, his General Sociology course constitutes a space to understand not only Bourdieu’s ideas, but also all the ways in which he developed these ideas, the paths he traced and retraced in facing the questions and hypotheses constantly posed in his research and in his lectures. Duval recalls that lectures took place in an amphitheater that was always crowded, with CSE members in the audience. In parallel with this course at the Collège de France, Bourdieu coordinated a seminar at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences, in which a significant part of his collaborators was present (^{ROSATTI; CONSOLIM, 2018}).

If in the first year of the General Sociology course Bourdieu briefly pointed out the relationship between the concepts of field, habitus and capital, it was in the second year that he promoted a densification of the first two concepts. For ^{Champagne and Duval (2020)}, Bourdieu dedicates his courses at the Collège de France, after that second year, to the concept of the field, imposing on himself the necessary work of deepening it, which he felt had to be done at that moment. The centrality of this concept would therefore integrate the concepts of habitus and capital, being the main reason we witness a multiplication of his research on the field. The evidence of this intellectual and investigative enterprise will be present in the lectures and in the next courses at the Collège, as well as in his research and publications on the university, legal, literary and State fields. That way, we can understand how the position as Chair at the Collège de France was essential for Bourdieu – and certainly for many other names who occupied the other Chairs – to consolidate a research agenda for himself and his research group, and, due to the symbolic weight of this institution in the French scientific field, to radiate this agenda from the center to the periphery of this field.

Following the same line of the first year - in the sense of the constant correlation between theorization and research - when dealing with field and habitus in the second year, Bourdieu combines a kind of historical genealogy of his concepts with the methodological recommendation to work on the intersection between field and habitus. The first step would be the study of the process by which the social is inscribed in materiality; the second step, in turn, would consist in analyzing the process of incorporation, which transforms objective structures and conditions into permanent provisions; and, finally, the third step would concern the study of the relations between these two forms of existence, the spaces of positions (fields) and the dispositions (habitus) (Bourdieu, 2015). It is relevant to assert, as does ^{Setton (2002)}, that from the intersection of the two concepts, Bourdieu’s objective with the operationalization of the concept of habitus consisted in identifying the mediation between the individual and society, overcoming watertight perspectives.

In the third year, Bourdieu turns to the debate about capitals, understanding the existence of an intimate relationship between the specific properties of capitals and the properties of a given field. Despite understanding that there are as many types of capital as there are fields, Bourdieu considers that two capitals are fundamental to understanding the functioning of the social world: cultural capital and economic capital. In the case of cultural capital, it could be found in three states: incorporated, objectified and institutionalized. These assertions made by Bourdieu his course are central to the understanding of the dynamics of the social world from field theory.

In the course of 1984, Bourdieu made a preamble on the teaching of sociology, in which he indicated that sociology, like other sciences, could be taught in two ways. In his words:

In fact, sociology, like all sciences, can be taught in two ways: we can teach principles, formalisms, or implementations of these formalisms. By intellectual temperament, I would prefer the second formula, one that consists of showing science in action in research operations, but since the conditions in which I am going to place myself obviously prevent me from actually doing so, I sought some kind of compromise between the intention to transmit the forms and the intention to transmit implementations of these forms. (^{BOURDIEU, 2016}, p. 25-26, our translation).

In order to achieve this goal, Bourdieu indicates that he organized his lectures in two parts, the first dedicated to theoretical analyses, and the second dedicated to how to build an objective, develop a problem, and especially implement theoretical formulations onto concrete problems. This didactic division of Bourdieu’s exhibition clearly represents his conception of sociology and of scientific practice. In this sense, we could affirm that Bourdieu as a professor represents a continuum in relation to Bourdieu as a researcher, seeking to transmute his research orientation into his lectures. As ^{Sapiro (2018)} points out, Bourdieu’s position in France ended up overshadowing the division that exists in many countries between the institutions dedicated to theory and the ones dedicated to empirical research.

Starting the fourth year of the course, Bourdieu states that he contemplated several possible branches to organize the discipline, having focused his analysis that year on perceptions about the social world. These would be “conditioned” by the position that agents occupy in the world, thus unfolding in one of the main characteristics of the field, which is its bellicosity, the existence of struggles around a certain worldview. Notably, the holders of a greater amount of cultural capital have a greater capacity to explain, or even to construct, a certain objective, official, quasi-legal worldview. Then we can understand that a worldview is produced in the relationship between habitus and capital, and we can point out that, in this movement, he develops a sociology of social perception. It is during this course that Bourdieu presents the analysis of the symbolic revolution promoted by Manet (1832-1883) and the impressionists against academic art; this analysis was the focus of his book The Rules of Art, published in 1992. We can thus realize that, in addition to synthesizing ideas, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France served to disseminate ongoing research, which would only later be published.

In the last year of the General Sociology course, Bourdieu addresses the very complicity that exists between habitus and field, highlighting how practical sense guides ordinary practices. This debate dialogues directly and particularly with the book The Practical Reason, which, along with Distinction, were his two great works published before he joined Collège de France. Seeking to bring together the two central aspects of the field as a field of forces, but also as a field of struggles, understanding that symbolic struggles aim to alter the field of forces, Bourdieu is interested in breaking through everyday constructions. For this purpose, he breaks with the traditional division between sociology and anthropology, articulating a union of the social sciences. It is quite true that his empirical examples refer to the fields of research in which he has a broader experience, as in the case of the sociology of education and culture.

The ending of his course brings about a reflection on the place of social sciences in symbolic struggles that aim to produce a certain vision of the social world, while pointing to the need to articulate a structuralist and constructivist perspective to understand the social world, a proposal that became known as genetic or constructivist structuralism. These aspects reinforce how the thread of a reflective sociology runs through all of Bourdieu’s work (^{VALLE, 2013}), as well as his practice as a professor.

The abstracts of his courses also make reference to some publications, with elements that attract a lot of attention. The first is the central role of the Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales journal in the diffusion of his ideas, constituting the main space of publication of his articles. Among the 43 publications mentioned, including articles, books, collections and translations, 18 of them are articles published in this journal. It was founded by Bourdieu in 1975, and defined in a certain sense a break with the other specialized publications in France, making it possible to publish non-definitive texts, thus constituting a true “sociological laboratory-in-action” (^{WACQUANT, 2002}, p.105). Many of the articles published there worked as essays for part of the works later published in books (HEY; CATANI; MEDEIROS, 2018).

Another aspect that draws attention is the circulation of his works in terms of translation: 5 works are referenced in German, 2 in English and 1 in Portuguese, the others are in French. The one work in Portuguese is the collection Sociology in Question, published by Marco Zero Limited, having been referenced in the course that Bourdieu taught between 1982 and 1983. In the case of the author’s diffusion in Brazil, it is important to emphasize that, before this compilation – originally published in 1981 –, some articles by the author had already been translated and published in collections. Also published were The Economy of Symbolic Exchanges in 1974, organized by Sergio Miceli, who had been his doctoral advisor in France, as well as Playback in 1975 and The Disenchantment of the World: Economic structures and Social structures in 1979 (BORTOLUCI; JACKSON; PINHEIRO, 2015).

With regard to communications and missions, up to the fourth year of the course, there is record of his participation in activities organized in European countries: in addition to France, his practice in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and Italy is also of notice. In the fifth year of the course, in addition to participating in activities in Europe, in the period between March and April of 1986 Bourdieu held numerous activities in American universities, with conferences at the Universities of New York, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Baltimore, as well as seminars at the Universities of Chicago, Princeton and San Diego. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the process of receiving Bourdieu’s works in the United States intensifies. Before this set of conferences and seminars, Bourdieu had six works translated into English⁷, and by the end of the 1990s sixteen more works of his had been translated. For ^{Lizardo (2012)}, there would be three phases of the reception of Bourdieu’s work in U.S. sociology, and this period is considered the second of them, which the author calls the Berkeley phase. It is a period in which Loïc Wacquant becomes a professor at the University of that city, and the main articulator in the United States of the project to disseminate Bourdieu’s work on the other side of the Atlantic.

During this period, Bourdieu signs the Propositions pour l’enseignement de l’avenir/Rapport au Président de la République (1985), requested by the then French president Francois Mitterrand (1916-1996). In addition to thinking about the propositions that are present in this report, which ranges from the use of modern teaching and learning techniques, through the autonomy of teaching and appreciation of the teaching profession, it is interesting to consider the scope of his practice at the Collège de France, enabling the existence of an intervention in the social world stemming from the social sciences, thus reaffirming the place of such sciences in the symbolic struggles around a certain vision of this world.

Final considerations

Often Bourdieu’s trajectory is interpreted as an exception that confirms the rule, given the exceptionality of his formative and professional path. His arrival at the Collège de France marked the culmination of this journey, especially considering that he was for about twenty years the only representative of sociology in this institutional space, and, as previously pointed out, there has not been a new professor of sociology in the strict sense since then. His death in 2002 left a significant void in the French academic field, one that has not yet been filled, the way we see it. As stated by ^{Brito (2002}, p. 6):

It is difficult for such a significant position to remain vacant for long. Thus, the candidates to his succession symbolically trample one another on the steps of the Collège de France, each network sustaining with greater or lesser emphasis its candidate. First, however, a distinction must be made between his material estate and his intellectual heritage.

Although a significant part of Bourdieu’s intellectual estate was more “easily” divided, such as the direction of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne and the journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, the fact is that his place at the Collège de France remains without successors. As we could observe, in this space he established a continuity between his practice as a professor and his position as researcher, reaffirming the inseparability between theory and practice, opting for a path to teaching sociology that is only effective through not only the exposition of its theoretical foundations, but also through the presentation of theory in practice.

It is important to emphasize, finally, that his General Sociology course was not only a sociology course in the broader sense, but rather an essentially Bourdieusian sociology course, guided by central concepts of his work, such as habitus, field and capital.

If his lectures also involved a reflection on the place of the social sciences in symbolic disputes, it can be said that his professorship was in itself an exercise in the application of this debate, since it placed in the public arena – given the open character of the Collège de France – the discussion about the place of sociology in the social world. We can say that Bourdieu reaffirmed in his professorship the understanding that the socials, and Sociology in particular, are central in the existing symbolic disputes, aiming to produce a true epistemological break with the more immediate perception of the real. Although his place in this institution remains vacant, his intellectual work remains current and necessary for the understanding of the world in which we live.