{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026865671641791045, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0042643923240938165, 'mean_word_length': 5.222811671087533, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Bourdieu, the state and method

Addressing himself to the way the modern state has inflected the methodological discourses of the social sciences, Pierre Bourdieu offers a proposition: 'To endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state' (1998: 35). The hyperbolic style of Bourdieu's proposition is owed to more than the characteristic elan of his writing persona. As he notes in his reading of Thomas Bernhard's novel Alte Meister Komodie, 'hyperbolic doubt' is a method that he and Bernhard share; it is a presupposition of his epistemological radicalism. In his attempt to rethink the state, Bourdieu asserts that he subjects 'the thought of the state' to 'hyperbolic doubt,'as he articulates his 'epistemic radicalism' with 'political questioning' (p. 36). In this brief homage to Bourdieu, I draw inspiration from the epistemic radicalism he deploys on the thought of the state, elaborate his suggestion about the insights deriving from the political questioning inherent in some fictional writing and offer a critique of his version of the social formation in order to radicalize the critique of state thinking to which he addressed himself late in his scholarly career and to discern the intimations of a history of political economy in the writings of thinkers who have an ambivalent relationship with their socio-literary fields. To situate Bourdieu's method, one must recognize that Bourdieu was a post-Kantian in an epoch in which most of the social sciences remained in a pre-Kantian epistemological slumber. His epistemological radicalism articulates with his uneasiness about the relationship of social scientists to social issues. Social scientists, he noted, had largely responded to 'the social demand for knowledge' by recycling and ratifying the 'the social problems' evinced in the discourses dominated by the state bureaucracy (p. 38). The doubt governing Bourdieu's approach to social and political orders (and to the intellectual frames with which academics approach those orders) is thus a legacy of his appreciation of the trajectory of the German philosophical critique of empiricism and objectivism, beginning with Kant's insights into the aporias of knowledge, proceeding to Hegel's Kant-inspired rendering of the dilemma of epistemology (in brief, that