His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.īourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual 'prophet', or the 'total intellectual', as embodied by Sartre.

He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. It does this, according to Bourdieu, by emphasizing individuality, rivalry, and ‘distinction’ and by devaluing the well-being of society as a whole.”īourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. It serves the interests not merely of status but of power. In other words, the esthetic world view serves as an instrument of domination. “Bourdieu’s analysis transcends the usual analysis of conspicuous consumption in two ways: by showing that specific judgments and choices matter less than an esthetic outlook in general and by showing, moreover, that the acquisition of an esthetic outlook not only advertises upper-class prestige but helps to keep the lower orders in line. The work in some ways redefines the whole scope of cultural studies.' There is in this book an account of culture, and a methodology of its study, rich in implication for a diversity of fields of social research.

'One of the more distinguished contributions to social theory and research in recent years. It will provide the historian of the future with priceless materials and it will bring an essential contribution to sociological theory.' Bourdieu's subject is the study of culture, and his objective is most ambitious: to provide an answer to the problems raised by Kant's Critique of Judgment by showing why no judgment of taste is innocent. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.

Distinction by pierre bourdieu