Towards A Dispositional Comprehension of Conservatism

This paper presents a social critique of the conservatism as an ideology or a way of thinking through Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology. It is argued that the established definition of the conservatism cannot analyze the holistic reality of the concept since it does not take into account of the conservatism as a set of dispositions. In addition to that, having the political discourse and cultural products as the only legitimate unit of analysis, the established definition of conservatism constructs an abstract actor whose link with the social world is essentially intellectual. Against the limits of the commonsensical definition of conservatism, this paper interrogates the merits of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. It first introduces the key conceptual tools through which the French sociologist constructs the social world as a social topography. The paper explains both objectivist and subjectivist moments of research object construction. It also underlines the role of symbolic struggles in the formation of social world. Finally, this study develops a dispositional definition of conservatism as the symbolic form that the principles of vision and division gain within the struggles of various fields. The merits of the dispositional comprehension of conservatism are compared with the existing empirical definition of conservatism as a set of cultural values.