Illusion

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Illusio (from Latin: ludus = the game) describes, according to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the belief in the meaning and meaningfulness of a game, game understood as the alignment with the implicit and explicit rules of a social field such as science or religion.

According to Bourdieu, illusion is the mechanism by which social groups or classes and individuals deceive themselves and are deceived about the actual power structures of society. In doing so, they unconsciously contribute to the reproduction of the existing order.

Bourdieu takes a materialistic approach with his theory of illusion . The basis and the underlying mechanisms of individual social fields such as religion, science, art and literature remain hidden from the people who share the respective illusion . According to Bourdieu, the individual fields each have their own economy, which remains closed to people, since they only associate the field of economy with economic laws. In contrast to orthodox-Marxist approaches, the basis for social fields does not represent an economy as a whole in the sense of social modes of production, but each field has its own economy. In the struggle for cultural , social and symbolic types of capital , access to positions, resources and power of definition, the investment gains from transactions in reputation, prestige and position are paid off.

One example he cites is the system of assessment and position in the French education system. This makes the "game" about capital, the capital in the Bourdieu sense, possible, since against this background most participants / members of society are caught in the illusion of equal initial conditions.

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