<i>Habitus</i> as relational subject: A Hegelian grounding for Bourdieu’s sociology

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice is one of the most ambitious attempts to overcome the structure/agency dichotomy in twentieth-century sociology. Yet it has been criticized for determinism, circularity, and theoretical incoherence. Critics argue that habitus collapses agency into structure, operates tautologically by deriving class from dispositions and dispositions from class, and fails to account for dispositional plurality or historical change. This article contends that such criticisms stem from a substantialist misreading of a fundamentally relational theory. Drawing on Hegel’s dialectic of Universal, Particular, and Individual as a grammar of mediation, we reconstruct habitus as the relational operator through which objective positions become generative of practice. What appears as circularity emerges instead as recursive mediation, and dispositional plurality presupposes rather than refutes relational unity. The article offers an ontological clarification that strengthens practice theory as a framework for analyzing social reproduction and transformation.