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The production of the dominant ideology. This article consists of group of documents and analyses which treat single subject from different perspectives : the social philosophy predominant among those who occupy positions of power. This new "dominant ideology" is considered simultaneously as product and as mode of production. 1) The Encyclopedia of Received Opinions. Here the commonplaces current in the places of power are presented in the form of an encyclopedia or dictionary. Each entry, corresponding to one of the key words of this ideology, comprises one or several citations taken from one or another of the analyzed works which may be either individual or collective. (The corpus of works cited was established by procedure which took into account both membership of the authors in certain official institutions and the frequency of intercitations.) 2) The Royal Science and the Fatalism of the Probable. The analysis of these texts allows us to discern the principal schemes giving rise to the language spoken by the holders of power : involving the opposition between the "past" and the"future", the "blocked" and the "open", the "small" and the "great", the "immobile" and the "mobile", "stagnation" and "growth", etc. Each of these fundamental oppositions evokes, more or less directly, all the others, and the evolutionist scheme they express can be applied to everything from the crisis of winegrowers in southern France to social science research. But the most directly political consequence of this cardinal opposition becomes apparent when the new system of classification is applied to the opposition between the right and left, with the result that this fundamental opposition of the political field is declared to be "surpassed". According to this way of thinking, "socialism" and "syndicalism" are on the same side as the "immobile" and the "blocked". They are "archaisms" belonging to the "past", just like their symmetrically arranged counterparts "fascism" and "parliamentarism". The optimistic evolutionism of reconverted conservatism (variants of which can be found in the universities) is the product of the same scheme as the pessimism of openly avowed conservatism, whose hierarchy it simply inverts. Against the pessimistic philosophy of the declining sections of the bourgeoisie, the new social philosophy affirms its faith in the future and, first of all, in the future of science and technology. It sacrificies the old conservative ideologies to forward-looking ideology suited to social universe in the midst of expansion. Progressive conservatism, a seemingly contradictory combination, is supported by section of the dominant class which holds as an objective law that which in fact constitutes the objective law of its own perpetuation, namely, that one must change in order to preserve. Reconverted conservatism is distinguished from the old conservatism in that it wants the inevitable to occur. The inevitable : on the one hand, this is what among the various futures which could be realized given the current social structures conforms to the interest of the dominant class and which is helped on its way by being presented as inevitable ; on the other hand, it is what must be let go of in any case in order to avoid that which must be avoided at all cost, the subversion of the established order, a possibility which is also inscribed in the laws of historical evolution. The new group of leaders is informed, and, above all, about its history : it invokes historical precedents and the lessons of the past, not as means of legitimating itself, however, but in order to avoid previous errors. Political history functions as a method of perceiving political actions and is transformed into an intellectual scheme capable of dealing with them in their current setting. Take, for example, a purely rhetorical scheme, like the one taught explicitly at "Sciences Po" (the Institut Etudes Politiques de Paris), which opposes two extreme positions -for example dirgism and liberalism or parliamentarism and fascism- in order to surpass them by "raising the level of debate". Such scheme functions as matrix of ways of talking and of acting applicable everywhere because it reproduces the double exclusion of the conservative rear-guard and the progressive avant-garde. And it is this exclusion which constitutes the definition of enlightened conservatism. Rhetoric contains a politics because it contains a history. But history's most important lesson is the discovery that one can no longer expect anything from history : the universe of possible political regimes (modes of domination) is exhausted. The fatalism inherent in the ideology of the end of ideology is the hidden condition of scientistic use of statistical forecasting and economic analysis. Neither science nor phantasm, the language of the dominant groups is political language, that is to say, a language of great potency, which, although not true, is capable of making things come true. To escape from idealism it is not enough to speak of the "dominant ideology" ; the analysis must trace the metamorphoses which transform the language of dominance into a working tool. For this language is only the accompaniment of a politics, a self-fulfilling prophecy which contributes to its own realization because those who produce it have an interest in its truth and possess the means of making it come true. 3) Neutral Places and Commonplaces. Reconverted conservatism is the product of ideological reconversion strategies that the avant-garde of the dominant class attempts to impose on the other sections of this class by establishing a new mode of production of the dominant way of talking about the social world. The small handicraft producer has been supplanted by a collective enterprise assembling, in organized confrontations (colloquia, commissions, committees, etc.), people who occupy -often simultaneously- widely differing positions in the field of the dominant class. The illusion of objectivity produced by neutral places results essentially from the eclectic structure of the groups assembled in them. The neutral language in evidence on such occasions arises "naturally" from the confrontation of individuals belonging to different groups. There has been a marked increase in the number of institutions of this type, charged with organizing the work that the dominant class must perform upon itself in order to secure the required collective conversion and reconversion. This is the reason for the development of institutions for economic research directly subordinated to the needs of the bureaucracy, of institutes of public opinion, and of schools designed to train future leaders, where the language of the dominant class is submitted to a rationalization requiring rationalized instruction. (These two schools are roughly equivalent to, say, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and the Kennedy School of Public Administration at Harvard University, and, to a lesser degree, to the London School of Economics). Veritable neutral places bringing together enlightened leaders and realistic intellectuals, such schools legi-timate the thought categories and ways of acting developed by advanced sections of the dominant class. They transmit to future leaders the experience accumulated by the dominant class in the course of historical conflicts. In the production of the language of the dominant groups, it is impossible to distinguish what pertains to production from what pertains to circulation : the most specifie properties of the product, namely the ensemble of unexamined presuppositions and the collective belief accorded them, are produced in and through the circulation process. The hidden structure of the field of production makes it the site of a circular circulation capable of generating a certain self-confirmation and self-reinforcement. This false circulation engenders collective belief by establishing a sort of prophetie chain in which each one preaches to the converted, who in turn will preach, without seeming to do so, to others who are also already converted.

The scientific field. The seemingly "pure" and "disinterested" universe of science is a social field like any other, with its power relationships and monopolies, its conflicts and strategies, its interests and profits. A kind of game whose particular stakes consist in the monopoly of scientific authority (prestige, recognition, fame and so forth), the scientific field owes its main cha racteristics to the fact that the producers generally have no other possible clients than their direct competitors. For this reason, the latter are the least inclined to accord scientific value to the products offered without first subjecting them to examination. What is always at stake in scientific conflicts, in which each of the actors must engage in order to have the value of his products accepted, is the power of imposing the definition of science best conforming to his own individual interests ; for the definition of what is at stake is itself part and parcel of the stakes in such a conflict. And the form taken by this struggle over scientific legitimacy depends on the structure of the distribution of the specific capital of scientific recognition among the participants. The history of science shows that as the accumulated scientific ressources grow scientific competition tends to assume the form of constant series of minor revolutions rather than that of intermittent great revolutions, and that along with this change the difference between the conservative strategies of the dominant members of the field and the subversive strategies of those first entering it ("the challengers") seems to diminish. Accordingly, the fundamental question which arises for scientific sociology of science is that of defining the social conditions that must be fulfilled for social game to be established in which true ideas possess great force because the participants have an interest in the truth rather than as in other games in the preservation of their interests. Science has no other foundation that the collective belief in its foundations, a belief which is both the result and the presupposition of the very functioning of the scientific field. But depending on the degree of autonomy of the scientific field under consideration with respect to external determinative factors, the proportion of social arbitrariness incorporated in the particular system of presuppositions generating belief can vary widely. In the case of the social sciences progress towards the real autonomy which is the condition of self-regulating and self- sufficient scientific field comes up against obstacles unknown elsewhere.

Planning and the social sciences. The changes which have occurred in the field of the social sciences can not be understood without consi dering the political economic and social developments on which they depend. Various reforms pertaining to the organization of the field along with modifications in its financing and the differentiation in the modes of this financing indicate desire on the part of the authorities to link the social sciences more closely to government and administrative concerns. These pressures manifest themselves differently in the economics, which has been firmly tied to the domain of economical politics, especially since the in troduction of central planning, than in sociology which since the 1960's has been more urgently sollicited to respond to social needs The effects on the intellectual development of these disciplines, howewer, are to be explained, first of all, by their respective positions in the field of science : that of economics being near the pole of political and economic power, and that of sociology near the intellectual pole. The very rapid expansion of research during the confirmed and strengthened the tendency of economics to become incorporated into the scientific institutions closest to the pole of political and economic power. In sociology, this expansion at first enabled the sub ject to mark itself off more clearly from its parent disciplines, philosophy and history (a development that can be seen in the proliferation of properly so ciological publications). Its "internal" conflicts, however, point to the existence of political conflict which, in the long run, could bring about its gradual transition into a discipline employed mainly in the service of the government and the administration.

The modes of domination. The foundation of all the significant differences between modes of domination resides in the degree of objectification of the accumulated social capital, that is to say, in the existence of relatively autonomous fields : the economie field (self-regulating market), the field of cultural production (educational System), and the political field (legal and governmental apparatus). One may thus distinguish very schematically the two extreme forms between which all the possible modes of domination can arise. On the one hand, there are the social universes in which the relations of domination form, dissolve, and reform in and through interaction among individuals; here the relations can endure only at the price of personal effort and continual upkeep. On the other hand, there are the social formations in which the relations of domination are mediated by objective and institutionalized mechanisms. Among the latter are those which produce and assure the distribution of aristocratie titles, academic degrees, and money; they are independent of the individual's consciousness and beyond his powers to modify. The study of a precapitalist agrarian society such as the Kabylian allows us to grasp what may be called the "elementary forms of domination", the two ways of keeping someone permanently in a situation where he is directly dominated by another person. These two ways function by means of debts and of gifts,that is to say, by explicitly economic obligations (material violence) or else by moral and emotional obligations created and maintained by exchange (symbolic violence). The author attempts to show that it is not enough to observe, as M.D. Sahlins does, that a precapitalist economy necessarily involves the domination of one person by another. For it is essential to realize, as well, that this domination must be concealed by a screen of magical relationships. In other words, it must be hidden in order to be respected. Gift-giving, generosity, and ostentatious distribution (the limiting case of which is the potlatch) are acts of social alchemy observable whenever the direct and brutal exploitation of one man by another is not possible. Mechanisms of the same order can still be observed in capitalist societies; but there they are restricted to the domain of art and "culture", the place of pure and disinterested consumption, the sacred island lying apart from the universe of production.

Modes of domination and revolutions in England. In his discussion of modes of domination and class conflict in England, mainly in the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, E.P. Thompson reviews the result of his own works on the formation of the working class and of more recent studies of class struggles in the eighteenth century. He shows that in order to create a Marxist history of class domination in England, it is necessary to reexamine the various schemes and presuppositions associated with the Marxist historiographical tradition and developed in conjunction with the study of French history. These schemes consist in analyzing transformations in the modes of domination on the model of violent revolution (cataclysmic model); conceiving of a radical opposition, wholly lacking in interpenetration, between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; and depicting the modes of domination on the model of the throughgoing imposition of a full-scale hegemony. The author investigates the workings of the domination imposed by the gentry and of the counter-violence offered by popular terror.

Power and public assistance : fifty years of social services. The author bases her description of the development of social services in France on an account of the transformations that this movement has produced in the image of the subordinate classes. Her analysis makes apparent the objective functions of the social services : the extension of control by the dominant groups to all areas of the life of the dominated groups and the securing of their adherence to the former's conception of the world. This control is accompanied by a constant pressure on the System of representations and attitudes which constitute the ethos of the working class and the basis of its class consciousness. One of the major forms this pressure takes is the continual elaboration of an image of the working class which facilitates, first, the devaluation of this class as a class, and, then, the denial to it of all the generic specificity.