No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.

In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different...

This volume brings together Bourdieu's most important writings on art, literature and aesthetics. Bourdieu develops an original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary, art and cultural criticism in the late-20th century: aesthetic value and judgement, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority.

Over the last three decades, Pierre Bourdieu has produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory and research of the post war era. Yet, despite the his influence, no single introduction to his wide-ranging work is available. This book offers a systematic and accessible overview, providing interpretive keys to the internal logic of Bourdieu's work by explicating thematic and methodological principles underlying his work. The structure of Bourdieu's theory of knowledge, practice and society is first dissected by Loic Wacquant; he then collaborates with Bourdieu in a...

Politicians today often know very little about the ordinary lives of their citizens. Preoccupied with opinion polls, the media and party political struggles, they lose touch with the very people whom they are supposed to represent. On the other hand, for many ordinary people today, the social conditions of their lives are getting worse. They find it increasingly difficult to live and to make ends meet; their neighbourhoods are disintegrating, their opportunities are limited and their view of the future is tinged with hopelessness and despair. While politicians are talking to one another, the...

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It examines a number of key philosophical questions, and places them in a new light.

This is a study of Flaubert and the formation of the modern literary field. It was in the 19th century that the literary universe as we know it today took shape, as a space set apart from the approved academies of the state. No one could any longer dictate with authority what ought to be written, or decree the canons of good taste: recognition and consecration were produced in and through the struggle in which writers, critics and publishers confronted one another.

'This is not an autobiography.' - Pierre Bourdieu. Pierre Bourdieu's commitment to a reflexive sociology led him ineluctably to take on the final challenge of a self socio-analysis in which he recounts and analyses, more fully and intimately than ever before, his understanding of the trajectory that led him from the peasant world of Barn, through sometimes painful years as a lycee boarder, as a student in 1950s Paris and as a conscript in the Algerian War, to the pinnacle of the French intellectual and academic world. 'This is not an autobiography', he said of this work but it reveals much of...

In this second edition of this classic text the authors develop an analysis of education. They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the social system.

"A classic study of forced displacement by one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century"--