It was in the economic sphere that the situation pertaining in Czechoslovakia most resembled Kabyle society. The institution of profit was taboo in both societies. As amongst the Kabyles, economic subjects pretended that the endeavour to enrich themselves was alien to them. I am not an economist and will therefore refrain from going into details. However, the deep decline in the level of contractual guarantees of these transactions, coupled with a drop in the weight of the institution of law and state, a change in the proportion of economic and non-economic coercion linked to the relativisation of the power of money, a sovereignty stripped of the institution of individual, transparent, legally guaranteed (private) ownership, which had lost the support of the state… historians of political economy still have a lot of work to do if they are to explain how it all worked. However, even at first sight it is clear that in many ways – and I cannot help but feel in the most fundamental ways – our market resembled more an archaic than a modern market. When comparing the economic and sociological perspective on human behaviour, James Coleman (1988) shows that sociologists understand it above all as the outcome of socialisation and focus on explaining on how it is shaped, constrained and directed by its monopoly of legitimate violence, political action proper can be exercised only by the effect of officialization and thus presupposes the competence (in the sense of a capacity socially recognized in a public authority) required in order to manipulate the collective definition of the situation in such a way as to bring it closer to the official definition of the situation and thereby to win the means of mobilizing the largest possible group, the opposite strategy tending to reduce the same situation to a merely private affair. To possess the capital of authority necessary to impose a definition of the situation, especially in the moments of crisis when the collective judgement falters, is to be able to mobilize the group by solemnizing, officializing, and thus uiniversalizing a private incident… It is also to be able to demobilize it, by disowning the person directly concerned, who, failing to identify his particular interest with the ‘general interest’, is reduced to the status of a mere individual, condemned to appear unreasonable in seeking to impose his private reason – idiotes in Greek and amahbul in Kabyle… It is natural that politics should be the privileged arena for the dialectic of the official and the useful: in their efforts to draw the group’s delegation upon themselves and withdraw it from their rivals, the agents in competition for political power are limited to ritual strategies and strategic rituals, products of the collectivizing of private interests and the symbolic appropriation of official interests.” [Bourdieu 1977: 41]
98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS523859