Using Bourdieu's Theoretical Toolkit of Habitus, Capital, and Field to Advance Understanding of Radical Milieus

This chapter examines how Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field can enhance understanding of radical milieus. Bourdieu wrote relatively little about social movements and contentious politics. Nonetheless, his thinking has increasingly gained traction in this subfield as scholars have identified the potential for Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit to both complement and advance other dominant paradigms in this area, such as resource mobilization and political opportunity theories. This chapter introduces Bourdieu’s core concepts and then explores how they contribute to thinking in three key areas of scholarship on radical milieus: the emergence of radical milieus, how radical milieus interact with the “mainstream,” and individual pathways through radical milieus. The chapter argues that particular strengths of Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit for the study of radical milieus are the way it can integrate individual and structural levels of analysis and how it enables the integration of different strands of theory on social movements and collective action.