WHAT IS POLITICAL CAPITAL? ECONOMIC ANALOGIES, SOCIAL FORMS AND MODES OF APPROPRIATION AND INVESTMENT IN FIELDS AND POLITICAL MARKETS

Political capital is a very present category both in social life and in social science literature. In the social world, "political capital" functions as a word through ordinary uses, while in the scientific field it aspires to exist as a concept. In order to specify the content of this concept and its explanatory scope, it is impossible not to request the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, an author who theorized the notion of capital in relation to a field. Unlike other fields, Bourdieu made incursions in a piecemeal manner into the political field and the kind of capital that predominates there, "political capital", which explains the inaccuracies of the concept. It is to clarify what can be understood by political capital that this article seriously takes in to account the analogies of economic reasoning and its limits to understand the operation of this kind of capital when it is invested in the field. This will lead us to approach this concept by thinking with, and sometimes against, Pierre Bourdieu.