Pierre Bourdieu has been considered by some to be the nearest figure that France now has to Jean Paul Sartre. A typical French intellectual, he is sharp, incisive and biting in his criticism of globalisation as advocated in the 1990s. He is no Marxist either, and like many of the French intellectuals like Ernst Bloc, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, fiercely independent.

The book under review is a collection of some of his interviews, newspaper articles and letters spanning the years from 1995 to 1998. Though much of the context is located in France and Europe, his comments have a much wider appeal including for those in India.

He points to the fact that what gives the dominant discourse its strength is that that there is no alternative to neo- liberalism, that it has succeeded in presenting itself as self- evident, that there is no alternative to it. "If it is taken for granted in this way, this is a result of a whole labour of symbolic inculcation in which journalists and ordinary citizens participate actively. Against this permanent, insidious imposition, which produces, through impregnation a real belief, it seems to me that researchers have a role to play. First, they can analyse the production and circulation of this discourse. Through a whole series of analyses of texts, the journals in which they were produced and which little by little imposed themselves as legitimate, ... to impose as self- evident a neo- liberal view which essentially, dresses up the most classic presuppositions of conservative thought of all times and all countries in economic rationalisations."

He points to a CIA funded journal that over a period of 20- 25 years managed to propagate and make "self- evident" such ideas for granted. Similarly, he refers to the fact that Thatcherism was not invented by Mrs Thatcher, but "the ground had been prepared over the years by groups of intellectuals most of whom wrote columns in leading newspapers."

The author says that the economic- sounding discourse "would not be able to circulate beyond the circle of its promoters without the collaboration of a host of people- politicians, journalists, and ordinary people with a tincture of economic culture sufficient to participate in the generalised circulation of the debased words of an economic vulgate."

A long time critic of the television as a medium, Bourdieu observes, "There is an enormous gap between the image that media people have and give of the media and the reality of their action and influence. The media are, overall, a factor of depoliticization, which naturally acts on the more de-politicised sections of the public, women more than men, on the less educated than the rich... Television (much more than the newspapers) offers an increasingly de- politicised, bland view of the world, and it is increasingly dragging down the slide into demagogy and subordination to commercial values."

Pointing to the role to school teachers in particular, and family counsellors, youth leaders, rank-and-file magistrates and also, increasingly, secondary and primary teachers, 'they constitute what I call the left- hand of the state, the set of agents of the so- called sending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed by the right hand of the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public ands private banks and the ministerial cabinets. A number of social struggles that we are now seeing (and will see) express the revolt of the minor state nobility against the senior state nobility."

The sense of despair lies, however, in that the right hand of the state no longer wants to know what the left hand does. "In any case, it does not want to pay for it." The process of regression of the state shows that resistance to neo- liberal doctrine and policy is that much greater in countries where the state traditions have been strongest. And that is explained by the fact that the state exists in two forms: in objective reality, in the form of a set of institutions such as rules, agencies, offices etc. and also in people's minds.

The state is an ambiguous reality. It is not adequate to say that it is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class. The state is certainly not completely neutral, completely independent of the dominant forces in society, but the older it is and the greater the social advances it has incorporated, the more autonomous it is. It is a battleground, for example, between the finance ministries and the spending ministries, dealing with social problems.

The main weapon in the battle against the gains of the welfare state is the powerful discourse of globalisation, an idee force, an idea which has social force. In the name of this model, flexi- time is imposed. It means night- work, irregular working hours, things which have always been part of the employer's dreams. Bourdieu terms this as flexploitation.

In a general way, he avers, neo- liberalism is a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest of the oldest capitalists. It is a characteristic of conservative revolutions, that in Germany in the 1930s, those of Thatcher, Reagan and others, that they present restorations as revolutions. The current revolution, unlike the previous ones, does not invoke the myth of the past, instead it appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case). Galileo said that the natural world is written in the language of mathematics, the neo- liberal ideologues want us to believe that the economic and social world is structured by equations.

The advance of neo- liberalism is also seen in the destruction of the economic and social bases of the most precious cultural gains of humanity. The autonomy of the worlds of cultural production with respect to the market, which had grown steadily through the battles and sacrifices of writers, artists and scientists, is threatened.

Competence is at the heart of the theoretical justification of those in power today. Plato had a view of the social world which resembles that of technocrats, with the philosophers, the guardians, and then the people. This philosophy is inscribed, in implicit form, in the educational system. It is very powerful, and very deeply internalised.

"Why have we moved away from the committed intellectual to the 'uncommitted intellectual'?" he asks and answers: Partly because intellectuals are the holders of cultural capital and even if they are dominated among the dominant, they still belong among the dominant. That is one of the foundations of their ambivalence, of their lack of commitment in struggles. They obscurely share this ideology of competence. When they revolt, it is still because, as in Germany in 1933, they think they are not receiving their due in relation to their competence, guaranteed by their qualifications.