Abstract

Philosophical anthropologies (PAs) – ontological assumptions about human species-nature – have long faced Foucauldian post-structural rejection of their value and legitimacy in explaining sociological problematics. In this article I endorse Bourdieu’s resistance to a post-PA momentum, arguing that PAs need assuming in sociological research. In the process, I explore PAs within Bourdieu’s research framework, including how his key empirical-analytic concepts – ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘illusio’ and ‘forms of capital’ – echo the PAs he assumes. Yet I argue his conceptual framework would do better without a PA he sometimes explicitly invokes: a ‘libidinal’ drive to compete for power in ‘games’ of social-field labour. I then draw on data from a survey of Australian education academics, who comment on how workforce restructures negatively affect their research and teaching labours. From the data, I argue that assuming a power-competitive PA as a driver of field labours inhibits attention to ethically-motivated desire for better labour purposes, fuelling critically-reflexive capacities to challenge field-structured power games. In turn, I diagnose that Bourdieu’s conceptual framework needs, but lacks, Marxian assumption of a human-species impulse for labours to serve use-valued social purposes, and that commodification of labours generates emotional alienation. I therefore suggest a ‘Marxification’ of Bourdieu’s framework.