the form par excellence of the symbolic struggle for the conservation or transformation of the social world through the conservation or transformation of the vision of the social world and of the principles of di-vision of this world; or. more precisely, for the conservation or transformation of the divisions established between classes by the conservation or transformation of the systems of classification which are its incorporated form and of the institutions which contribute to perpetuating the current classification by legitimating it.14 The social conditions of possibility of this struggle may be found in the specific logic by which, in each social formation, the distinctively political game is organized. What is at stake in this game is, on the one hand, the monopoly of the elaboration and diffusion of the legitimate principle of di-vision of the social world and, thereby, of the mobilization of groups, and, on the other hand, the monopoly of the use of objectified instruments of power (objectified political capital). It thus takes the form of a struggle over the specifically symbolic power of making people see and believe, of predicting and prescribing, of making known and recognized, which is at the same time a struggle for power over the "public powers' (state administrations). In parliamentary democracies, the struggle to win the support of the citizens (their votes, their party subscriptions, etc.) is also a struggle to maintain or subvert the distribution of power over public powers (or, in other words, a struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate use of objectified political resources - law. the army, police, public finances, etc.). The most important agents of this struggle are the political parties, combative organizations specially adapted so as to engage in this sublimated form of civil war by mobilizing in an enduring way, through prescriptive predictions, the greatest possible number of agents endowed with the same vision of the social world and its future. So as to ensure that this enduring mobilization comes about, political parties must on the one hand develop and impose a representation of the social world capable of obtaining the support of the greatest possible number of citizens, and on the other hand win positions (whether of power or not) capable of ensuring that they can wield power over those who grant that power to them.
Thus, the production of ideas about the social world is always in fact subordinated to the logic of the conquest of power, which is the logic of the mobilization of the greatest number. This explains, no doubt, the privilege granted, in the way the legitimate representation is built up, to the ecelesial mode of production, in which the proposals (motions, platforms, programmes, etc,) are immediately subjected to the approval of a group and thus can be imposed only by
professionals capable of manipulating ideas and groups at one and the same time, of producing ideas capable of producing groups by manipulating ideas in such a way as to ensure that they gain the support of a group (through, for example, the rhetoric of the political meeting or the mastery of the whole set of techniques of public speaking, of wording one’s proposals or of manipulating the gathering, techniques which allow you to ‘get your motion carried', not to mention the mastery of the procedures and tactics which, like the manipulation of the number of mandates, directly control the very production of the group).
It would be wrong to underestimate the autonomy and the specific effectiveness of all that happens in the political field and to reduce political history properly speaking to a sort of epiphenomenal manifestation of economic and social forces of which political actors would be, so to speak, the puppets. This would mean not only ignoring the specifically symbolic effectiveness of representation, and of the mobilizing belief that it elicits by virtue of objectification; it would also mean forgetting the proper political power of government which, however dependent it may be on economic and social forces, can have a real impact on these forces via its control over the instruments of the administration of things and persons.
