Forms of knowledge and the love of necessity in Bourdieu’s clinical sociology

The potential for sociological knowledge to assist in counteracting deleterious social forces remains a live problem. The present article approaches this from the perspective of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and offers an explication of what can be called Bourdieu’s ‘clinical sociology’. This approach presents specifically personal modes of ‘counteracting’ those social forces that entrench themselves in the body. The article begins by examining the central position, within Bourdieu’s philosophical anthropology, of knowing the world as the primordial mode of engaging with it. The clinical task begins with people coming, reflexively, to know what they know. Once they appropriate this knowledge, it becomes possible either to labor on overcoming this knowledge, by a form of bodily re-learning, or to relent to the necessity of a world that they lucidly know extends beyond their capacity to amend