other possibilities? Do you think the part this has to play is more significant than intellectual capabilities -- that people have the potential to recognize the wider truths, but their economic and family situations prevent them from reaching them?

TE I argue in my book that the full business of internalizing, legitimating the authoritative power is itself a complex matter which requires capacity, intelligence. A degree of creativity is needed even to accept that one is being defined in a negative way, as low on the scale or as oppressed. And it is a paradox, I think, that the legitimation of a dominant power is never just a passive affair -- a matter of taking it into yourself; so the capacities you are talking about must be there even for people to accept a dominant power, to define themselves in relation to it. I would have thought that much of Pierre Bourdieu's work is about the conditions in which people can or can't acquire capital.

PB There is a sort of de facto division of labour of social production with respect to major varieties of experience. Very often the persons who are able to speak about the social world know nothing about the social world, and the people who do know about the social world are not able to speak about it. If so few true things are said about the social world, the reason lies in this division. For example, doxa implies a knowledge, a practical knowledge. Workers know a lot: more than any intellectual, more than any sociologist. But in a sense they don't know it, they lack the instrument to grasp it, to speak about it. And we have this mythology of the intellectual who is able to transform his doxic experiences, his mastery of the social world, to an explicit and nicely expressed presentation. That is a very difficult problem for social reasons. For example, if the intellectual tries to reproduce the experience of a worker, as in France after 1968, he encounters the experience of a worker who lacks the habits of an intellectual. Many of the things he is appalled at are in fact quite run-of-the-mill. He must be able to include in his vision a description of the worker's experience -the fact that it is an experience from his point of view. And that is very difficult. One of the reasons why intellectuals don't pay attention, in my view, is that they have very many interests related to cultural capital. I will give you an example: I was always shocked by what Marx said about Proudhon; he was very hard on him. Marx said: 'He is a stupid French petty-bourgeois'; that Proudhon only writes aesthetics from the point of view of the Greek aesthetes; that Proudhon was very naive. Marx, for his part, learnt Greek; when he was eighteen he was able to write in Greek. He condescended to Proudhon as a poorly educated pettybourgeois, whereas Marx had had the classical education befitting the son of a high functionary of the Prussian monarchy. Such distinctions are very important. When you look for the crumbs of Marxism, they

-273-