the appearance of the great political bureaucracies of full-time professionals and with the appearance of institutions (such as, in France, the institul des sciences politiques and the Ecole nationale d'administration) whose function is to select and educate the professional producers of the schemes of thought and expression of the social world - politicians, political journalists, high-ranking civil servants, etc. - at the same time as they codify the rttles according to which the field of ideological production functions and the corpus of knowledge and practical skills indispensable for them to conform to these rules. The political science’ taught in the institutions specially designed to fulfil this purpose is the rationalization of the competence demanded by the universe of politics and possessed in a practical form by professionals: it aims at increasing the efficiency of this practical mastery by putting at its service rational techniques, such as opinion polls, public relations and political marketing, at the same time as it tends to legitimate it by giving it the appearance of scientificity and by treating political questions as matters for specialists which it is the specialists’ responsibility to answer in the name of knowledge and not of class interests.11
The process whereby the field of ideological production becomes more autonomous is doubtless accompanied by an increase in the standards expected of anyone seeking right of entry to the field and, in particular, by a reinforcement of the demands on their general or even specific competence. (This helps to explain the increase in the influence of professionals educated in the universities and even the specialized higher-education institutions - the Institul des sciences politiques and the Ecole nationale d'administration - to the detriment of ordinary militants.)13 It is also doubtless accompanied by a strengthening of the effect of the internal laws of the political field -and in particular of competition between professionals - when compared with the effect of direct or indirect transactions between professionals and non-professionals.1’ This means that, in order to understand a political stance, programme, intervention, electioneering speech, etc., it is at least as important to know the universe of stances currently offered by the field as it is to know the demands made by non-professionals of whom the leaders, in adopting these stances, are the declared representatives (the "base'): adopting a stance, a prise de position, is, as the phrase clearly suggests, an act which has meaning only relationally, in and through difference, the distinctive deviation. The well informed politician is the one who manages to master practically the objective meaning and social effect of his stances by virtue of having mastered the space of actual and
A Self-interested Blunder
Coluche’s decision lu stand for President in France was immediately condemned by almost all political professionals, who called it Poujadism. However, you would seek in vain among the themes proposed by the Paris comedian the most typical topics of the bookseller from Saint-C^re, Poujade, as the classic study by Stanley Hoffman has listed them: nationalism, anti-intellectualism, anti-Parisianism, racist and quasi-fascist xenophobia, exaltation of the middle classes, moralism, and soon. And it is difficult to understand how ’well-informed observers' were able to confuse the 'candidate of all minorities’, of all those 'who are never represented by political parties’, 'gays, apprentices, Blacks. Arabs, etc.’, with the defender of small shopkeepers struggling against ‘wogs’ and 'the stateless mafia of drug-traffickers and queers’.*
