Internet Exercises

Exercise 1

Collins and Makowsky note: “Bourdieu’s system is completely closed. It is totally cynical, totally pessimistic. We are eternally doomed to stratification, and to misrecognition of our bonds. We cannot get outside our own skins; we can only change places inside an iron circle” (p. 249).

Go to http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/bourdieu.html. After you have read the contents of this review of Bourdieu’s Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, answer the following questions:

1. What is Bourdieu’s point concerning the “half-wise economists”?



2. What are Bourdieu’s feelings about the “intellectuals of the political-administrative establishment”?



3. The reviewer has two quarrels with Bourdieu’s defense of the welfare state. What are these two major objections? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

Exercise 2

Collins and Makowsky observe: “In Wallerstein’s model, individual societies do not control their own fates. To understand the development of any particular society, we must place it in the context of the world-system” (p. 256).

Go to http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html. After you have reviewed the contents of this link, answer the following questions:

1. Describe Wallerstein’s four categorical “regions”: core, periphery, semiperiphery, and external.



2. Describe the four stages in the history of the capitalist system.



3. Construct a summary of Wallerstein’s world-systems theory.