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Habitus And Gesinnung Research Paper

1551 Words7 Pages

Change Your Thoughts To Change Your World? : Exploring Bourdieu’s concept of Habitus and Weber’s concept of Gesinnung and their Relationship to Structural Change Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber are two foundational theorists in the field of sociology. In Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Bourdieu and Weber present two important concepts: habitus and gesinnung. Both habitus and gesinnung (which I will refer to from now on in its English translation, “frame of mind”) are Bourdieu and Weber’s way of classifying the temperaments or dispositions specific to an individual or group of individuals. In this paper I first discuss how Bourdieu and Weber explain how habitus and frame of mind regulate …show more content…

However, Weber/frame of mind differs from Bourdieu/habitus in the sense that Weber explains how a change in one’s frame of mind can justify current behavior that, in the past, would have been viewed as “bad”. In his discussion of the emergence of modern capitalism, for example, Weber says “The frame of mind (Gesinnung) apparent in the cited passages from Benjamin Franklin that met with the approval of an entire people would have been prescribed in the ancient world, as well as in the Middle Ages, for it would have been viewed as an expression of filthy greed and a completely undignified character” (Weber 82). Actions once deemed “selfish” may be viewed as actions serving one’s “self-interest” depending on an individual’s frame of mind. As a reader, when Bourdieu talks about changes in habitus, I am thinking that it as possible but I am also thinking about the level of discomfort associated with this change for an individual. Bourdieu’s explanation of habitus then, in my opinion, comes off as deterministic: objective structures produce culture, which determines practice, which reproduces those objective …show more content…

Bourdieu says that, while the habitus structures society, society is also structuring the habitus. Our habitus produces our thoughts and actions, which results in the continued creation of the external world. Bourdieu does not explain if or how an individual can break out of this cyclical process. In contrast, Weber spends the majority of The Protestant Work Ethic discussing the Protestant ethic frame of mind and illustrating to readers the part this “spirit” played in giving birth to the emergence of modern capitalism. According to Weber, the emergence of capitalism didn’t just require the rational organization of free labor or the systematic pursuit of profit (although these factors must be considered). A specific frame of mind, the protestant ethic frame of mind, played a role in the emergence of

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