THE SYMBOLIC REVOLUTION

Bourdieu (2003, p. 131) states that there is a general model for all symbolic revolutions. We are going to explore it by referring to the study dedicated to Manet, his most specific work (Bourdieu, 2013). He has reflected on that question at least since 1971, although the topic is already present in his early work on Algeria and the economy of symbolic goods (Sapiro, 2016, pp. 91-92 ). In a fundamental work for his perspective, Bourdieu (1971a, p. 334) points out the difference between political revolutions and revolutions that modify the way of judging and perceiving the world: the symbolic ones. Although the former need the latter, they do not always integrate them. We find identical statements in later works, for example regarding the difference between economic and symbolic transformation (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 234). Symbolic revolutions know different scales ranging from localized spaces -for example, pedagogical relations (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 274)- to structures of enormous historical scope, such as the modern state (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 226) or the crisis of the family related to the feminist or gay movement (Bourdieu, 2003, pp. 152-153; Bourdieu, 2016, p. 228).

All fields do not have the same logic, which is why we will refer below to certain specific features of the philosophical field as opposed to the field of painting or literature. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu studies the literary field, but at the same time he affirms that this study supposes a model that can be extrapolated to other fields, obviously prior empirical work, which in our case refers to the study of the Generation of '14. But before going into more detail, let us present the central features of the symbolic revolution.

Bourdieu begins to analyze demographic changes. The increased number of students produced a transformation of audiences that had been previously restricted. The bohemians were, in France, an artistic entity shaped by factors genuine to the Hexagon: political history (with the joint effect of the Revolution, the Restoration and the Empire) brought about a turnover of administrative staff, who seized power at a relatively young age. Furthermore, France’s centralization imposed the concentration of aspirants in Paris: the capital is the place where cultural capital -among others- is accumulated. The political elites, on the other hand, were strongly prevented against the social mobility produced by culture and the deleterious effects of the Arts and Humanities on the perspectives of the middle classes: Frédéric’s trajectory, the hero of Sentimental Education, unforgettably described by Bourdieu (1998, pp. 19-81) in The Rules of Art, is an ideal type of this period. The ambitious youth of the middle classes, unable to settle for their position, shifting from politics to art, represent a wind of social Fronde, although very politically ambiguous (Bourdieu, 2013, pp. 243-246; 2016, pp. 584-585).

Bourdieu does not mention it, but he seems to use Norbert Elias’s model (1989, p. 71) in The Civilizing Process as a reference. Elias described, during the 18^th century, the exclusion of the German intelligentsia by their national elite, which stood in contrast with the centripetal character of the French Court. The 19^th century in France, however, witnessed how the expectations -stirred up because of political changes on the turnover of cultural and administrative staff- were brutally shut out and the situation started to look like the one in Germany in the previous century. The dramatic growth in the cohorts that could access the educational system confronted graduates with their dashed hopes and, just like in May 1968, those who held the greatest expectations were the ones who experienced it the most. Just like Randall Collins (2009, pp. 791-797) , Bourdieu considers that scholastic repetition only works when the material foundations (economic, institutional, disciplinary) remain unaltered. When these get out of place -for instance, with the arrival of not integrated candidates-, there is a possibility of intellectual novelties breaking in.

What did the world of dashed hopes invent? The pseudo-proletarian intelligentsia (Max Weber) or a basic layer of the lumpenproletariat (in a note of 18 Brumaire, Marx included bohemians there, as Bourdieu recalls). Rejected, they did not go home; quite on the contrary: the rejection triggered an enormous process of multiplication of instances of academic consolation (schools, publishers, journals, colloquiums…). Such parallel symbolic markets went by their own momentum against an art that was fully controlled by the State, which worked as an apparatus. A mass audience was also born, as the school system provided for more producers and consumers. Bourdieu does not attribute any features of salvation to this new audience. Bohemians represent the empire of opportunists, of the rejected by the Salon and the Academy who wish they could have entered, of the mandarins who sense changes and switch sides…

This audience did not understand that Manet explored low-prestige themes, since the power of the norm lies in saying what is susceptible of being art and what is not, what is a big theme and what isn’t, what is, on a different level, an important philosopher and what isn’t, what is a fundamental historic event and what is a bagatelle: bohemians, despite their turbulent character, could still defend the canon (claiming to be better than the ones who were in it) or replace the privileged poles while maintaining the hierarchical system. Spaces opened up, audiences changed, France’s political history generated a political apparatus too centralized and distrustful. In Manet, the state always appears linked to a routine norm that introduces heteronomy into the artistic field, although this is not the only logical and empirical possibility: on other occasions, a state intervention can reinforce the autonomy of a specific social field. We will show how fractions of the field of state, also influential in the intellectual field and linked to processes prior to themselves, promoted the symbolic revolution in the Generation of '14.

However, bohemians by themselves, they don’t explain it all. Replete with loose cannons, speculators and tricksters, Manet could not rely on this group to build an alternative instance of consecration. Because this is exactly what any creator needs: someone who assures him that he is not mad, that he is not an impostor pretending to be cursed. Bourdieu always insisted that social conditions enable a symbolic revolution, but do not determine it absolutely (Bourdieu, 2013, pp. 389-396; Bourdieu, 2017, p. 615): it is necessary to understand the specific logic of the production space in which the author in question is located and what the author transforms in it. In the next sections, we will try to provide an answer to that question: what conditions does intellectual autonomy possess according to Bourdieu and what allows it to resist academicism?

SCHOLASTICISM: THE INFLUENCE OF SYSTEMATIC INSTITUTIONS ON CULTURAL CREATION

Bourdieu is confronted with the scholastic attitude because, even in its best versions, it is the main obstacle to a historical sociology of art. What do we understand by scholasticism? In principle, it is the set of dispositions generated by academic experience and, very remarkably, the liberation from practical urgencies ¹ . This liberation from the demands of daily life comes with the submission to the exclusively academic demands and tends to be projected towards all the works of culture and, in general, to the view on the social world.

Nonetheless, Bourdieu leaves some questions open in his identification of scholasticism. On the one hand, in a specific sense connected with the production of academic habits, he identifies as scholastic the art dependent on a school (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 168). In more general terms, he considers the dehistoricized reading that characterizes commentators as scholastic (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 106). Bourdieu rotates between explanations without being clear: sometimes he seems to preach the academy’s scholasticism; then, scholasticism is equated with dehistoricized commentary, which only pays attention to the works and to whatever can be deemed worthy or unworthy in them with respect to the canon.

The doubt could be resolved by trying to clarify Bourdieu himself, which is always a risk. We could get out of the problem by pointing out that scholastic criticism entails an intellectual reading of all practices: obviously, those practices arising from the academic institution itself, but also other practices that have nothing to do with it and even break away from it, philosophical and artistic practices that are different from commenting philosophical texts or exhibiting one’s mastery on the canvas. There is an identical anxiety underpinning the young philosopher who wishes to guarantee his status by comparing Merleau-Ponty with Husserl (though without studying the ideological and intellectual crisis of Catholic philosophical societies in the 1930s) and the reader of Manet who only allows himself to talk about the Venus of Urbino (but not about the socio-demographic shifts of the symbolic revolution): not tarnishing the canon with social or historical problems which are by definition excluded from it. These practices share a similar disposition to that of artists or philosophers who reproduce dogmatic patterns in their works dictated by an institution which, protected by tradition, ignores the social and historical genesis that gives meaning to the practices that are transmitted.

An important difference, however, can be established between academic art and the artistic field: in the latter, the specifically aesthetic skill is increasingly valued. This can also be said of the philosophical field in a certain sense, but in a much less explicit way. In academia, both in philosophy and painting, the norm stemming from the scholar universe is irresistibly established, to the point that it ends up conceptually wasting art itself or creative philosophies. When an academic writer reads a work or commentates a painting, he will always look for specific features: whether its finish is good, whether the author is competent according to the dominating pattern, whether the historical references are correct… But what does he forget? The fact that an innovative work harbors a tradition, but it also alters what was transmitted of it and the uses by means of which it was transmitted, connecting it with new uses or sensitivities, or even recovering the living richness of a tradition as opposed to its reificated version caused by academic routine (Bourdieu, 2012, pp. 355-364 ). Therefore, he proposes a new way to read history, a new way to define the finish of works, a new way, in sum, to define the artistic, literary or philosophical skill. In this sense, as Bourdieu reminds us, when Manet sought to be admitted in the painting canon, he intended something impossible: for the canon to accept what was going to destroy it. In sum, in order to be loyal to authentic iconological or conceptual innovation, the history of artistic and philosophical creation needs to invoke much more than just icons or concepts. Manet’s symbolic revolution was indigestible for scholar and scholastic reading devices (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 172).

READING DIFFERENTLY, WITHOUT SCHOLASTIC MUTILATION. BEYOND THE QUESTION OF BREAK AND CONTINUITY

Bourdieu’s argument about the symbolic revolution reminds us of a thesis by Randall Collins (2009, pp. 150-151). After comparing Greece and China between 500-300 BCE, Collins confirms the existence of twelve creative generations in the former and a shorter sequence in China. Chinese authoritarian patterns imposed legitimation in a way that Athens never did, where Plato could develop his philosophy without trouble, despite it being completely hostile to democracy. In the case of France, the creation of alternative markets allowed for the survival of intellectuals in conflict with the norm. England, with its arriviste and submissive artists, draws analogies with the case of China’s Confucian unification, although in a more decentralized way. Paris and Athens have two things in common: the concentration of the space of attention and the possibility of a competitive intellectual market not severely monopolized by any political institution, which facilitate ties between schools, debates and rivalries. Without them, intellectual life can perish due to dispersion and to the absence of a critical mass.

But we still have the problem of what revolutionizes the revolutionary. In the first place, revolutionaries do not reject tradition: rather, they proof that orthodoxy misunderstands it. Manet had the history of painting embedded in himself and therefore, he was able to rescue Velázquez against the art pompier of his time. His contemporaries, who boasted of upholding tradition, actually ignored it; in fact, they only knew about it what the school administered, and the school always captures the past in a biased way. Bourdieu devises a magnificent formula: Manet proposed “a mobilization of the technical capital that had accumulated over the history of painting, but had been mutilated by academic selection” (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 355). Wherever there is a norm, continuities, consecrated genealogies… the revolutionary proposes new syntheses. At that moment, the academy loses its symbolic support because, with its actions, the revolutionary accuses it of separating what should not be apart and of uniting what should be separated.

In support of his thesis, Bourdieu (2012, p. 285) appeals to the description of Heidegger’s attack to the neo-Kantians. Although the analogies between the philosophical field and the artistic field come from Bourdieu himself, the peculiarities of the former must be established. The philosophical field, whose existence Bourdieu (2003, p. 34) traces back to the fifth century BC is characterized in the contemporary world by the constant loss of its own objects, which have been monopolized by specialized disciplines. In this sense, the philosophical field must always refer to such lost knowledge, to a large extent demonstrating its unacknowledged debts to philosophy (Bourdieu, 2003, pp. 43-47). The relationship of philosophy with its tradition is not identical to the logic of permanent revolution that characterizes the fields of restricted production in art, where producers produce for a public of creators, with the inevitable mediation of intermediaries: critics, editors, gallery owners... (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 208-209). The specifically philosophical activity consists much more in a permanent rereading of tradition in order to confront present conflicts (Bourdieu, 2016, p. 571). Certainly, Bourdieu considers that any great creator knows the history of his field. In philosophy this is shown in a more intense and academically guaranteed way. In fact, it has been pointed out that a condition of belonging to the field is still the competence in the history of philosophy (Pinto, 2007, p. 65). This is something that is well verified in the case of Heidegger.

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger showed the primacy of Aesthetics and the intuition about the logical categories of knowledge and the foundations of science. Time, which is constitutive of imagination, lays the foundations for the subject of knowledge; therefore, science is not embedded in logic, but in a deeper experience: the specific, existential temporality (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 71 ). Similar to what Manet did with Velázquez with regard to the pompier academia, Heidegger proved neo-Kantians that they did not know their prince of thought. He also avoided Jünger-like essayism like the plague. Where Jünger -equivalent to the Parisian bohemians- invoked Nietzsche, Heidegger went back to the pre-Socratics (Bourdieu, 1988, pp. 47-48). Therefore, the symbolic revolutionaries, like Heidegger and Manet, know the tradition but without its academic mutilation, and precisely because they know it, they distinguish themselves from the false revolutionaries, who are in truth amateur critics of academia (and this will always have an easy time to disqualify them).

Let us recapitulate: we have the crisis of the institution, with its plethora of aspirants who do not find their space and step forward to contest the mandarinate; in addition, we find the creation of new markets where to find support and, subsequently, we find a revolutionary who is particularly well-educated in the history of the field, be it Manet or Heidegger. And something enigmatic: we find a tradition mutilated by academia that allows the revolutionary to overcome orthodoxy (by precisely, using its forte: the “sources”) and to distinguish himself from the resentful criticism made by those expelled without much competence (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 455 ).

However, in which way is tradition mutilated? To our understanding, this is the key question. Tradition is mutilated because it is dehistorized and it turns ancestors into summarized and stereotyped characters susceptible of academic transmission, into mere labels, a coherence that ignores the whole pragmatic effort that the creator had to deal with. We can mobilize here Ortega y Gasset (2009, p. 730), who wonders about the temporality of thought and concludes that it depends on pragmatic situations and on how these -which unite thought and institutions- last through time. Bourdieu himself states something similar when he claims a “good use” of anachronism: when one has good general models, the past can be compared, always with precautions, with structural equivalents, homologous in certain oppositions, but not in others (Bourdieu, 2012, p. 360). This is an example of the mobilization of tradition, but it is a pragmatic mobilization that takes the thinker (or the artist) without removing him from his time and conflicts. The creator perceives the sociological and intellectual moment in which the conjunction claims a certain past. This, of course, is not taken from academic manuals: it requires to know more than what they contain, as well as knowing what in the concrete world claims a new reading of the past. The creator is possessed by the history of the field, as Bourdieu insists repeatedly, but he can also see the objective possibilities in the present. Is he an intellectual genius? Yes, but because he is a sociological, even a political genius. And that genius makes him a great painter or a great philosopher. Revolution is not just intellectual: it is also social. Otherwise, Bourdieu would take us back to the charismatic ideology of the creator. The creator can tell intuitively that there is an opportunity in a specific conjunction of a new articulation of tradition. Bourdieu (1998, pp. 222-223; 1988, pp. 56-57) insists that it is a collective process that cannot be made to depend on a single individual. As Fowler (2020, p. 454) points out, Bourdieu puts forward an "anti-charismatic conception of social creativity" and, referring to the links between symbolic revolutions and politics, states that "groups create themselves by creating people who create the group". In the artistic field, Bourdieu (1977b, pp. 5-7) argues that the value of the work depends on a circuit of agents that go beyond the writer or the painter. That said, there is no doubt that the creator is also an active agent who strongly resembles the prophet in the religious field. The prophet -or the creator- has nothing extraordinary about him, but he grasps the extraordinary situations and allows what was only among the virtualities of the present to exist (Bourdieu, 1971a, pp. 331-334). Moreover, Bourdieu (1998, pp. 185-188) has tried to specify the social properties of the great creators: they are subjects with a high symbolic capital, often coming from dominant classes, but absolutely distanced from bourgeois routines. We will return to this question later, with regard to the collective subjetc of the symbolic revolution in the Generation of '14.

Thus, do we recover the theory of charisma? Not at all: the description of the creator’s social and financial resources shows in some way the collective work from which the individual’s social intuition emerges. The creator concentrates a whole network of collective work on a proper noun. Favorable comments about Manet’s paintings can be explained by its previous relations: he could fascinate, indeed, but the fascinated ones were in networks that were already well disposed to a warm reception. “The more science progresses, the more the charismatic myth disappears” (Bourdieu, 2013, p. 442 ).

DIFFERENT WAYS OF INTERPRETING BOURDIEU'S MODEL OF SYMBOLIC REVOLUTIONS: CAN THE ACADEMIA CONTRIBUTE TO A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION?

In the previous pages we have seen how scholasticism could appear in different circumstances, though all of them express the discipline that some kind of external institution imposes over the space of cultural production. Now we would like to address one specific question: can the academia have a positive role in a symbolic revolution? As we have pointed out, we can find support for this in works by Bourdieu other than the one we have analyzed. In his course On the State, Bourdieu remarks that the state conditions, in collaboration or in conflict with the subjects of each field, the capitals that function in each social space. This can be done through the arbitrary imposition of bureaucratic rules, but also by encouraging the creation of autonomous environments, governed by their own rules (Bourdieu, 2012, pp. 196-197; Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 52-53). For Bourdieu, it is clear that Manet's revolution developed against the academy, but it is possible to think about a symbolic revolution whose basis are supported by a temporal institution.

For that to happen, the rules enforced by this institution should help a group of creators to resist the external influences threatening the authority of the very field of production to stablish principles of legitimacy over the system of relations of production, circulation and consumption of the symbolic goods that have a place in it. In order to affirm that this institutional intervention contributes to a symbolic revolution, in addition to supporting the autonomy of the field it must, paradoxically, promote its transformation and guarantee a space of relative cultural freedom.

Bourdieu (1971b, p. 50) proposes three dimensions necessary for the formation of an autonomous intellectual or artistic field: 1) the development of a market for symbolic goods, which opens up the possibility of economic independence and a principle of impersonal competitive legitimization, free from the tutelage of temporal authorities such as the aristocracy, the church or the state; 2) the constitution of a specialized group of producers and intermediaries of the symbolic goods in question; 3) the multiplication and diversification of specific and competitive consecration instances within the field. Subsequently, this field is structured in an opposition between two poles: that of restricted production, aimed at an audience of producers, and that of production aimed at the general public (Bourdieu, 1971b, pp. 54-55). Of course, Bourdieu (1971b, p. 49) reminds us, autonomy is always relative and external pressures never cease to exert their influence, although this is expressed with a variable refraction effect depending on the field's own categories.

We argue that these three dimensions are present in the case of Generation of 14' in Spain, a group that played a fundamental role in a symbolic revolution that promoted the autonomy of the intellectual fields especially linked to the state through the university, as well as in the journalistic field. In this article we will focus on the philosophical field, although references to the effects of the Generation of '14 in other social spaces will be inevitable, given its interdisciplinary character and its active -albeit unequal- political involvement. In the following, we will briefly review ² how the three dimensions of an autonomus field proposed by Bourdieu are expressed for the philosophical field in the Generation of '14:

Development of a market for symbolic goods: at the beginning of the 20th century, a series of cultural and socio-demographic transformations were observed in Spain that allow us to speak of a significant increase in the public of virtual consumers of symbolic goods, observable in the expansion of access to university and in the transformation in the mode of generation of a relevant fraction of Spanish elites. We will devote the next section to this, using the study by Costa Delgado (2019) .

Considering the above, we propose the case of the Spanish Generation of ‘14 as an example of a symbolic revolution developed through the academia, and not against it. Not every symbolic revolution is made against the academia from the outside. And so, the rejection of a castrating academia would just be one of the historical possibilities in which the creative autonomy against scholasticism is expressed. As mentioned above, here we adopt Bourdieu's view of academia as a set of public cultural institutions promoted and financed by the State, with the university in a place of special relevance. Of course, as every academia, these institutions enforced a set of rules that modified the cultural agents' behaviour in a very significant way, either through submission or rejection, in many different intermediate degrees. We believe that, in the case of Spain at the beginning of the 20th century, these temporal institutions were capable of producing a liberating interference in the cultural production, reinforcing pre-existing tendencies -and at the same time as a result of them-, as well as reinforcing the actions of specific agents -which, in turn, modified the orientation of these temporary institutions, in conflict and collaboration with other agents.

The case of the Generation of '14 allows us to explore a logical possibility that Bourdieu's model admits, but which is not present in Manet's empirical case. In the Spanish case, the symbolic revolution had the support of a fraction of the state in the face of pressures fundamentally coming from the political field (from positions of different ideological signs, but especially from the parties of turnism, which controlled the political power in Spain during the Restoration) and from the church, an institution with an enormous influence in the Spanish educational system. But does not such support from the state imply a form of interference from a temporary power that questions the autonomy of the field? We believe not, as long as such interference reinforces the autonomy of the field by positively influencing the three dimensions previously mentioned (Bourdieu, 1971b). The curriculum of the republican Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in 1931, promoted by significant members of the Generation of '14, is a good example of this: the state sanctioned an official curriculum that recognized disciplinary specialization, greater freedom for studens to choose a personalized curriculum and greater autonomy for teachers within the subjects to be taught. These measures were intended to put an end to the "intellectual rigidity of the system of university chairs and opened up the possibility of disciplinary innovation, as well as introducing a certain degree of competition" (Niño, 2013, p. 96 ). One part of the academia used its institutional power against itself to counteract the scholasticism characteristic of the university at the end of the nineteenth century.

Let us now turn to Costa Delgado’s study (2019) , with the systematized data on the origin and social trajectory of a group of intellectuals and politicians involved in the Generation of ‘14. This will help us to deepen our understanding of the collective dimension of the symbolic revolution and will concretize the sociodemographic aspects mentioned above.

BRIEF METHODOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON THE GENERATION OF ‘14 IN SPAIN

The statistical categories used in this section require an additional explanation, since they are based on materials from empirical research whose selection should be justified. The Generation of ‘14 was a group of people who conceived themselves in generational terms, tried to act in a coordinated manner between 1910 and 1914, and continued to maintain close bonds and common practices until the Spanish Civil War, with the permeability that defines any social group in a complex society where social destinies are not fixed legally from birth. This group was characterized, sociologically, by its high cultural capital, its links with Madrid, its predominantly bourgeois background, its relative youth in 1914 and, what we find most interesting in this article, its major role in the radical transformation of the Spanish intellectual field in the early 20^th century, which we can define as a “symbolic revolution”. In short, such a revolution can be characterized by a greater intellectual autonomy from the political field and from the Church, materialized in the three dimensions mentioned in the preceding section, and the institutional recognition of this autonomy, with a rationalization of public administration that was accompanied by the transformation of the recruitment criteria for the civil service, especially at university. Of course, all this was accompanied by a radical transformation of the way of understanding intellectual production in the fields that were most affected by it: the various scientific fields closely linked to the university and the field of journalism; although the symbolic revolution also produced significant changes in other fields, especially the political one ⁴ .

Costa Delgado (2019, pp. 53-76) elaborated a reasoned corpus as a starting point for his study of the Generation of ‘14. Here, the existence of two indisputably generational manifestos -because of their content and signatories, in 1910 and 1913- offers many advantages: it is a wide selection that does not fall back into an arbitrary preselection of relevant personalities; it responds to the group’s internal criteria in relation to a specific social context; the manifestos are published in two important moments of the constitution of the group as such, and they generated significant responses and controversies following their publication; in short, it is the public image that the group projected when presenting themselves in society.

As far as this article is concerned, we will mainly use the treatment by descriptive statistics of a selection of variables from the signatories’ available data (there were 169 signatories of the manifestos, out of which around 100 present available data). The population of this study is a fraction of the Spanish elites that stands out for its cultural capital, but the study had to place it, at the same time, in a broader social context: in relation to other fractions of the elites -particularly those that stand out for their economic capital- and to those social sectors excluded from the elites -popular classes and petite bourgeoisie without cultural capital. Hence, the categories do not pretend to be universal or to reflect essential properties of the subjects, but rather combine social class criteria with professional ocupations whose access was mediated by the possession of cultural capital.

For the categorization of social positions, the study has been inspired by the variables used by Christophe Charle (2006, pp. 19-30) . We have adapted them to the Spanish case and considered some social sectors that he excluded for different reasons. The grouping of subjects into categories is not representative of the whole Spanish society of the time; rather, it is adapted to the characteristics of the study’s population: very nuanced in terms of the internal social divisions of the educated elites and with much more heterogeneous categories when it comes to economic capital and the popular classes. The latter two categories are in the minority -though present- among the signatories, but they are more frequent in their social background.

Also, 1910-13 and the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36) are generational milestones marking the beginning and end of the generational trajectory. The first date responds to the signing of the manifestos and the beginning of many of the signatories’ public presence; the second indicates the generational social destiny before the break and radical alteration of the political and social order that came with the Spanish Civil War. In addition to these two milestones, we added the signatories’ social background, collected from the available data from their parents’ birth certificates and the available biographical news.

THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS FOR CREATORS: A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS OF THE GENERATIONAL BREAK

What does the case of the Generation of '14 contribute to Bourdieu's model of symbolic revolution?

The characterization of academia as a social space based on the distance from necessity and practical urgencies had a strong presence as a normative ideal in the Generation of ‘14, as it can be observed in the recurring opposition between university professors and journalists, which structures important debates within the group. However, in this case, the symbolic revolution did not occur from the outside and against academia, but from a dominated part of academia against the institution’s conservative sector, relying on a bohemian group made up of young writers and journalists and, at least during its rise, on its dominated counterpart in the political field: the labor and the republican movement. The complex and variable composition of these groups generated in turn a receptive audience in face of a creative disposition prone to breaking the mold of an academia that was closed in on itself. If we resume the four defining socio-demographic factors of symbolic revolutions previously identified, we can better compare the contexts of the Generation of 14's and Manet. Let’s recapitulate: (1) crisis of the institution, (2) candidates without space and prone to rebellion, (3) new markets, and (4) revolutionary educated in the field, who renews it by recovering tradition in an original way.

Let us now comment on the social composition of the signatories of the generational manifestos, with the aim of contrasting the hypotheses derived from Bourdieu’s model of symbolic revolution. As seen above, in order to explain the exceptional nature of the symbolic revolutionary, what we previously termed as “creative autonomy”, Bourdieu does not only allude to his cultural capital, but also to “external” resources outside the intellectual field such as his social capital -the network of previous contacts that reacts favorably to his production and disseminates it- and his economic capital -which allows him to disengage from practical urgencies and from the economic repercussion of being excluded from consecrated spaces-. In sum, we wonder: is it possible to imagine creative autonomy from social coordinates that are different from Manet’s?

Let us look at three charts that depict the social trajectory of the Generation of ‘14: social background, social position in 1913 and social position during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936) of the signatories of two generational manifestos. Studying the differences between these three milestones will shed light on which type of social conditions were required to participate in the group and which social changes this concatenation of facts -which we sum up in the concept of generation- brought about to its participants.

A comparison between Chart 1 and Chart 3 leaves no doubt about the group’s evolution. In a family generation’s time, a limited upward social mobility occurred, combined with a conversion of economic capital into cultural capital, the latter being much more prominent than the former. The decrease in “Popular classes and petite bourgeoisie” compared to all the other categories, considering how this category is constructed in this research, shows that upward tendency in terms of social position. The variation in the proportion between university professors and secondary school teachers points in the same direction, although in this case, the social distance between both categories is much shorter. A piece of data that points towards the moderation of this social mobility is the fact that the proportion between mid-level civil servants and the sum of owners and high-ranking civil servants did not vary at all. Changes in legal professions and the category of “Journalists, writers and artists” are not good indicators of social mobility due to the great internal heterogeneity of these categories in terms of economic and symbolic capital.

The generational conversion of economic capital into cultural capital is evident. The enormous increase in university professors and secondary school teachers serves as an indicator of the importance of cultural capital in the social trajectory of the Generation of ‘14, which was also very closely associated with public administration. This can be observed in the significant reversal -practically symmetrical- in the number of owners and high-ranking civil servants, which shows an important generational shift in the way that elites were recruited: the Generation of ‘14 stood out for reverting the inherited financial and social capital in a determined cultural stake, thus modifying the conditions for the symbolic validation of economic capital. This lateral generational mobility of the elites, oriented towards public administration -especially towards educational and cultural institutions- is the biggest difference between the Generation of ‘14 and the symbolic revolution analysed by Bourdieu in Manet. The alliance between the revolutionary academic section and the intellectual bohemians can be clearly observed in the trajectory depicted in the three charts.

In terms of social background, we can see an important presence of economic capital (owners and a part of the petite bourgeoisie) and the cultural capital most closely linked to it and to politics (legal professions), although there is also a relevant link with administration, illustrated by the 21 signatories’ fathers who were mid-level civil servants. In this regard, it is important to note that the symbolic revolution does not come out of the blue, it is not an absolute novelty: it recovers potentialities that are present in the field and rewrites them, also at the family habitus level. In 1913, the lesser importance of the categories that we highlighted in the social background is confirmed, with the logical exception of mid-level civil servants. However, we also observe an important increase in those categories associated with intellectual bohemians (journalists, writers and artists) and academia (professors and students, but also a majority of mid-level civil servants linked to educational and cultural institutions). The early academic consecration that is shown in this second chart is accompanied in the social destiny chart (Second Spanish Republic, 1931-36) by an outstanding increase in high-ranking and mid-level civil servants, as well as a moderate growth in professors and teachers (already present in 1913). This occurred at the expense of a part of the intellectual bohemians who found a more stable social position, though not necessarily a more prestigious one, in public administration: the symbolic revolution, in this case, created an institutional space for the revolutionaries within the state apparatus.

The possibility of a symbolic revolution driven and sustained from academia is therefore demonstrated, having always in mind that, as we said before, this academia was very distant from the one described by Bourdieu for art in the Second French Empire. In the Spanish case, the previous generation had managed to introduce relevant changes in the recruitment of professors and in the access to the civil service, paving the way for the symbolic revolution of those who succeeded them. But what about the two missing requirements that, according to Bourdieu, accompany cultural capital in the symbolic revolutionary? Does the academic support of the Generation of ‘14 mean that social and economic capital were not as decisive to sustain “creative autonomy” against scholasticism?

In this aspect, the Spanish case seems to partially support Bourdieu’s claims, although there are two significant differences: 1. The collective and impersonal support that an academic institution guarantees is not exactly equivalent to the economic and social capital that a single individual can accumulate, even if we find a socially elitist selection in the access to the academia. 2. The fact of a symbolic revolution from inside the academia opens new theoretical possibilities to think this process in different empirical contexts and, above all, to analyze the logic of the field resulting from the symbolic revolution. Both differences have important sociological and philosophical implications, as discussed in the conclusion.

About the social and economic capital, the charts do not disclose any information beyond the evident social selection that shows the social background of the signatories. Only 16.67% belonged to the category “Popular classes and petite bourgeoisie”, a markedly low percentage compared with the quantitative representation of this category in the Spanish society of the time. However, the internal dynamics of the Generation of ‘14, studied from a qualitative analysis of trajectories and variables relative to the political evolution of the subjects provide us with more information, at least in regard to these three points:

In sum, academia allowed the Generation of ‘14 to have institutional support for its symbolic revolution, but it did not eradicate the weight of social and economic capital, as they continued to be an implicit part in the social recruitment of the intellectual and political elites that made up the group. This is different from Manet’s case, since managing a career and a creative process that are sustained by institutional networks does not respond to the same determinants as managing a career while being exclusively dependent on one’s family rent and a network of symbolically prestigious contacts. But the institution, at least in our Spanish case, did not remove the weight of these two factors in the possibility of participating in a symbolic revolution.