>Who controls the medium through which, and the institutions through which, our actions become meaningful to ourselves, by the very act of being publicly recognized in some kind of public arena? It seems to me that while if one is trying to understand the strategies by which people can move back and forth between “fields”, and especially, by which some are excluded from them, Bourdieu’s models are pretty much indispensable, they do little to tell us why anyone wishes to enter certain fields to begin with.
PaulHoule•5mo ago
That's a great find.
I'm not sure though that G.W. Bush had a lower IQ than Al Gore, but certainly G.W. Bush related to people who didn't think that they were so smart or at least educated.
I found a lot of people in the early 1950s for instance who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a lightweight I think because of his image
and that he worked hard to come across as relatable to "the common man" whereas his opponent in the 1952 election was the opposite type.
Anyhow I'm sure that you've seen many of my favorite sources on this but I'll point out both C. Wright Mills The Power Elite and the Tom Wolfe books The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
Mills defies the reductivism of 2025 in that he says there is not just one power elite but multiple power elites and just analyzes those in a great amount of detail. Those two Wolfe books pursue a theory that people can't all compete in the "master" status hierarchy but we can all be a star in our own little sky and that it's OK to find meaning in little things -- he explores a bunch of entertaining case studies and I like it so much better than that Acid Test book that gets read to death.
gsf_emergency_2•5mo ago
Very tangentially:
I found the essay where Graeber characterizes (even prima facie liberal) institutions as right-wing, in either your sense or mine:
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/value-as-the-importance-of...
>Who controls the medium through which, and the institutions through which, our actions become meaningful to ourselves, by the very act of being publicly recognized in some kind of public arena? It seems to me that while if one is trying to understand the strategies by which people can move back and forth between “fields”, and especially, by which some are excluded from them, Bourdieu’s models are pretty much indispensable, they do little to tell us why anyone wishes to enter certain fields to begin with.
PaulHoule•5mo ago
I'm not sure though that G.W. Bush had a lower IQ than Al Gore, but certainly G.W. Bush related to people who didn't think that they were so smart or at least educated.
I found a lot of people in the early 1950s for instance who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a lightweight I think because of his image
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7WaUPACuY
and that he worked hard to come across as relatable to "the common man" whereas his opponent in the 1952 election was the opposite type.
Anyhow I'm sure that you've seen many of my favorite sources on this but I'll point out both C. Wright Mills The Power Elite and the Tom Wolfe books The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
Mills defies the reductivism of 2025 in that he says there is not just one power elite but multiple power elites and just analyzes those in a great amount of detail. Those two Wolfe books pursue a theory that people can't all compete in the "master" status hierarchy but we can all be a star in our own little sky and that it's OK to find meaning in little things -- he explores a bunch of entertaining case studies and I like it so much better than that Acid Test book that gets read to death.