An internal reconstruction and an immanent critique of Bourdieu's generative structuralism is presented. Rather than starting with the concept of "habitus," as is usually done, the article tries to systematically reconstruct Bourdieu's theory by an analysis of the relational logic that permeates his whole work. Tracing the debt Bourdieu's approach owes to Bachelard's rationalism and Cassirer's relationalism, the article examines Bourdieu's epistemological writings of the 1960s and 70s. It tries to make the case that Bourdieu's sociological metascience represents a rationalist version of Bhaskar's critical realism, and enjoins Bourdieu to give heed to the realist turn in the philosophy of the natural and the social sciences. The article shows how Bourdieu's epistemological assumptions are reflected in his primary theoretical constructs of "habitus" and "field." To concretize their discussion, it analyzes Bourdieu's reinterpretation of Weber in his theory of the field of religion and of the young Mannheim in his theory of the scientific field.By means of concepts and symbols we try to make a temporal order of words stand for a relational order of things.-S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key "Entities of the world-relate!" (Emirbayer 1997:312). This could be the motto of a relational sociology. Bourdieu has opted for another one, wich contains an ironic reference to Hegel rather than to Marx. In Méditations pascaliennes, a sociological meditation on the philosophies of our time from Searle to Habermas and Rawls, Bourdieu has described himself as a pascalien (Bourdieu 1997a:9). But I think that insofar as his "generative structuralism" (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990:3) can best be understood as an attempt to systematically transpose the relational conception of the natural sciences to the social sciences-an attempt which takes the form of an original synthesis of sociology (Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and Mauss [Brubaker 1985:747-49], but also Elias, Mannheim, and Goffman), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), linguistic philosophy (Wittgenstein and Austin) and, last but not least, neo-Kantian epistemology (Bachelard and Cassirer, but also Panofsky and Lévi-Strauss)-one could as well, and maybe even better, describe him as a "bachelardien." 1 Although the influence of Gaston Bachelard on Bourdieu has often escaped the attention of Anglo-American scholars who are not , and two anonymous reviewers for Sociological Theory for their useful comments and constructive criticisms.1 Bourdieu is not a syncretic but a synthetic and heretical thinker. He draws on Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and others but insofar as he critically corrects them, one could as well describe him as an anti-Durkheimian Durkheimian, an anti-Weberian Weberian, or an anti-Marxist Marxist. One could even say that he thinks with Althusser against Althusser and against Habermas with Habermas, but not-and this is probably the only exceptionthat he thinks with Bachelard against Bachelard. well acquainted with the French tradition of the history and ...

This article tacks back towards the idealist side of the argument, in a spirited defence of critical humanism against the radical symmetry of ANT. Vandenberghe argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the `flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination. Reasserting the categorical distinction between the ontological regions inhabited by humans and nonhumans, he develops a critical opposition between the gift economy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity between humans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and the commodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes the reification of persons, and turns them into strategically operating `humants'. This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its `fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described.

This article presents a systematic reconstruction of Georg Simmel's sociology of religion. Following the development of his sociology of religion, it successively analyses religion as a form of interaction, as a symbolic form and as a personal form. The main argument is that all of Simmel's writings are metaphysical and that religion is only one form among others that gathers the fragments of existence into a unified totality. Religiosity is the central category of Simmel's writings on religion. It 'detranscendentalizes' religion and locates its conditions of possibility within the aspirations of wholeness of the soul.

In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions (from Marxism up to Actor Network Theory) provides an elaborate systematic framework for introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing.

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