I present a brief and plea for historicist-analytical sociology. Analytical because it seeks to logically break down reality and the arguments developed to capture it into their constituent elements, planks, cogs and wheels; historicist because it takes time, discontinuity and contingency seriously; it digs into the specificity of empirical objects; and it strives to retrieve forsaken lateral possibilities in the unfolding course of events. I bring Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu together to articulate the six principles guiding this epistemological-methodological approach: (1) eschew the logic of the trial which seeks to establish responsibility and attribute culpability to social agents and institutions (social scientists are not moralists); (2) differentiate folk from analytic constructs; (3) define your concepts clearly and formulate your theory expressly; (4) disaggregate phenomena by breaking them down into their baseline constituents; (5) search for mechanisms, that is, recurrent processes producing, reproducing or transforming the phenomenon of interest; (6) heed temporality, detect discontinuities and specify counterfactuals. Historicity and analyticity are commonly seen as antagonists, the one wedded to the search for concrete specificity and the other geared toward abstract generality. I argue instead that they are moments of social analysis and that they can be practically brought together into a tensionful hitch driving the carriage of inquiry, and that this tension can be epistemically fruitful.

En este texto se expone y se reflexiona sobre la teoría de Bourdieu sobre las relaciones sociales consideradas como indisolubles relaciones de fuerza (materiales) y relaciones de sentido (simbólicas). Y en un segundo momento se establece la relación con Pascal.

The article analyzes the reasons behind the persistent invisibility of class discrimination in social life and social science. Unlike gender and race, social class is not readily visible, clearly bounded and its boundaries agreed upon; membership can change and is not officialized by the state; position is perceived as a flexible and meritocratic; plus the social sciences have failed to develop a properly analytic concept of discrimination. I illustrate my argument with field observation of a California criminal court in which bias based on class is pervasive and overt, yet unseen and affirmed by judges, prosecutors and defence attorneys.

The voluminous legal literature on plea bargaining in criminal court in the United States is largely devoid of empirical foundation and condemnation of the procedure typically rests on a priori moral judgments or juridical reasoning without clear purchase on the daily realities of prosecution. This article plugs this knowledge gap by documenting and dissecting a single episode of felony bargaining over one case based on a three-year ethnography of the workaday world of prosecutors, public defenders and judges in two county courts of northern California. Far from being mechanical, the production of the guilty plea entails skilled and complex juridical work exploring myriad facets of the case, including facts, the criminal profile and social personality of the defendant, the past and probable future arc of his conduct and the many parameters of punishment. This coordinated effort to achieve a modicum of substantive justice challenges the conventional view of negotiated justice as a cruel and thoughtless "assembly line" trampling over the rights of the defendant. The metaphor of the "swirl"-a buzz of activity and a complex dance-like spiraling movement engulfing the defendant-is more apt to convey the mix of diplomacy and confrontation that produces guilty pleas. Capturing the ins-and-outs of prosecutorial labor as it happens in the county criminal court is indispensable to painting a realistic and conceptually articulated picture of the penal state.

En su libro Bourdieu en la ciudad (2023), Loïc Wacquant ofrece una nueva lectura de la obra de Pierre Bourdieu, examinando el lugar de la ciudad en ella. En esta entrevista, realizada por Clément Rivière, basándose en tres décadas de investigación sobre la marginalidad urbana, hace una relectura que le lleva a subrayar el papel del poder simbólico en la fabricación de las desigualdades urbanas.

In the course of my response to the five critics of “Race as Denegated Ethnicity,” I explicate the core principles and concepts of my book Racial Domination (2025) by contrast with the reigning paradigm of “race and racism.” I assert the need to sharply differentiate analytic from folk concepts; to move from population to problematic; and to “provincialize” the US, whose racial common sense fosters essentialism at the heart of constructivism. I propose to grasp “race” as a disguised subtype of ethnicity (on both logical and historical grounds) and race-making as a particular case of a general theory of group-making as the “realization” of categories inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism. This theory seeks to model the dialectic of classification and stratification by means of Weberian ideal types. It breaks racial phenomena down into a concatenation of elementary forms: categorization, discrimination, segregation, seclusion and violence. Replacing “race and racism” with ethnoracial domination (with its three faces of exploitation, subordination and exclusion) enables social scientists to stop replicating the “race effect”; reveals that “racial capitalism” and “structural racism” are rhetorical and not analytical notions; and provides powerful tools for both understanding and undermining racial oppression.

Building on my book The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty ([2023] 2025), I make the case for “thick construction” as a rationalist approach to framing and conducting ethnography. Infused by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology, thick construction is a “construction squared,” that is, a scientific (analytic) construction of an ordinary (folk) construction. Anchored by the concept of social space, thick construction aims to dodge the danger of “ethnographism,” the tendency to want to describe, interpret, and explain a phenomenon based solely on the elements discerned through fieldwork. It allows us to avoid committing one or another of the five organic fallacies of participant observation: interactionism, inductivism, populism, presentism, and the hermeneutic drift. I diagram how thick description, grounded theory, the extended-case method, abductive theorizing, and thick construction configure the duet of theory and observation. Eschewing the false opposition between concept and percept, thick construction aims to build heuristics for fabricating new objects. In this approach, contrary to conventional views, theory is not the haughty master but the humble servant of empirical research as approximation of the real.

Ethnoracial violence is a dynamic and multilayered phenomenon whose definition is at stake not only in academe but also in reality itself. It comes in two varieties, expressive and instrumental, when it serves to buttress the other four elementary forms of racial domination, namely, categorization, discrimination, segregation, and seclusion. I point out that the phenomenon is relatively rare and burdened with heavy moral baggage. I introduce distinctions based on directionality (vertical, horizontal), scale of the actors involved (individual, group, or state), degree of spectacularization, and type of ethnic classification system (categorical, gradational). The imperial domain offers an especially fruitful terrain for the comparative investigation and theoretical elaboration of the dynamics of racialization, violence, and the state. Students of human brutality in history should join hands with comparative scholars of race to throw new light on their explosive intersection.

Dieser in Form eines Dialogs mit dem Stadtsoziologen Clément Rivière gehaltene Beitrag beleuchtet einige zentrale Ideen meines Buchs Bourdieu in the city: Challenging urban theory (Wacquant 2023) und zieht daraus analytische Schlussfolgerungen. Ausgehend von Bourdieus Trialektik des symbolischen, sozialen und physischen Raums ergibt sich ein spezifisches Verständnis des Urbanen als Ort der Akkumulation und Ausdifferenzierung von Kapital sowie der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen verschiedenen Kapitalarten und der Kombination und Kollision unterschiedlicher Habitus. Die Stadt ist ein Nährboden für soziale Felder und zugleich ein Motor sozialer Perplexität. Territoriale Stigmatisierung resultiert aus der symbolischen Markierung entwerteten Raums. Das Gefängnis ist eine städtische Kerninstitution, die ins Zentrum der Soziologie der Produktion und Regulierung von Klasse und ethnischer Marginalität gerückt werden muss. Um die Stadt zu verstehen, muss man den strafenden Staat verstehen und umgekehrt.

Basándome en mi libro The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty ([2023]2025), defiendo la "construcción densa" como enfoque racionalista para enmarcar y realizar etnografías. Infundida por la epistemología sociológica de Pierre Bourdieu, la construcción densa es una "construcción al cuadrado", es decir, una construcción científica (analítica) de una construcción ordinaria (popular). Anclada en el concepto de espacio social, la construcción densa pretende esquivar el peligro del "etnografismo", la tendencia a querer describir, interpretar y explicar un fenómeno basándose únicamente en los elementos discernidos mediante el trabajo de campo. Nos permite evitar cometer una u otra de las cinco falacias orgánicas de la observación participante: el interaccionismo, el inductivismo, el populismo, el presentismo y la deriva hermenéutica. Esquematizo cómo la descripción densa, la teoría fundamentada (“grounded theory”), el método del caso extendido, el análisis abductivo y la construcción densa configuran el dúo teoría-observación. Evitando la falsa oposición entre concepto y percepción, la construcción densa pretende construir herramientas heurísticas para fabricar nuevos objetos. En este enfoque, contrariamente a las opiniones convencionales, la teoría no es el amo altivo, sino el humilde servidor de la investigación empírica como aproximación a lo real.

Cet article examine la signification, le potentiel et les pièges du concept de « capitalisme racial » pour étudier les liens entre division raciale et dynamique économique. La critique des utilisations du terme montre qu’il stipule cela-même qui demande à être explicité, à savoir l’« articulation » du capitalisme « au travers de la race ». La notion ne prend pas en compte les fondements variés de la race, ni la particularité historique de l’esclavage dans le monde Atlantique. Les partisans du « capitalisme racial » doivent s’atteler d’urgence au dur labeur de spécification épistémologique de clarification logique et d’élaboration historique nécessaire pour faire de cette étiquette davantage qu’une simple « bulle spéculative conceptuelle ».