Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu French: ; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002 was the French sociologist in addition to public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to a sociology of education, the theory of sociology, together with sociology of aesthetics develope achieved wide influence in several related academic fields e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for modern Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.

Bourdieu's hold was primarily concerned with the dynamics of energy to direct or establish in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power to direct or determine is transferred and social configuration is keeps within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and made such influential view as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital as opposed to traditional economic forms of capital, the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence. Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu was a prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, near all of which are now usable in English. His best-known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste 1979, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. The parameter is add forward by an original combination of social theory and data from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such(a) as how to understand the referred within objective structures. In the process, Bourdieu attempts to reconcile the influences of both external social frames and subjective experience on the individual. The book would go on to be named "the sixth almost important sociological work of the twentieth century" by the International Sociological Association ISA.

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, particularly the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of possibility and high social mobility, achieved through formal education.

Thought

Much of Bourdieu's work observes the role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency. Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic authority as a principal part of power and agency within capitalist society.

Bourdieu's anthropological work was dominated by social hierarchy reproduction analysis. Bourdieu criticized the importance condition to economic factors in the analysis of social order and change. He stressed, instead, that the capacity of actors to impose their cultural reproductions and symbolic systems plays an fundamental role in the reproduction of dominant social structures. Symbolic violence is the self-interested capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is either ignored, or argued as natural, thereby justifying the legitimacy of existing social structures. This concept plays an essential element in his sociological analysis, which emphasizes the importance of practices in the social world. Bourdieu was opposed to the intellectualist tradition and stressed that social sources and cultural reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the society. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational pick Theory because he believed it was a misunderstanding of how social agents operate.

Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained an emphasis on the domination of symbolic systems in social life, as well as the notion of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu from a sociology of religion into a theory of fields.

From Arnold Hauser earlier published the orthodox application of Marxist a collection of things sharing a common attribute theory to the able arts in The Social History of Art 1951.

From Émile Durkheim, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu inherited astructuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification. However, Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does non operate according to a functionalist logic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an necessary part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of habitus.

Bourdieu was also influenced by Wittgenstein especially with regard to his work on rule-following stating that "Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He's a category of saviour for times of great intellectual distress". Bourdieu's work is built upon an attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which he thought characterized the social sciences subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism of his time. His concepts of habitus, capital, and field were conceived with the intention of overcoming such(a) oppositions.

During the 1990s, Bourdieu became more and more involved in political debate, becoming one of the most important public faces of intellectual life in France. While a fierce critic of ]. There is an apparent contradiction between Bourdieu's earlier writings against using sociology for – ]—"" transl."—his later career saw him enter the less academic world of political debate in France, raising the issue of whether the sociologist has political responsibilities extending to the public domain.

Although Bourdieu earlier faulted public intellectuals such as Sartre, he had strong political views which influenced his sociology from the beginning. By the time of his later work, his main concern had become the case of globalisation and those who benefited least from it. His politics then became more overt and his role as public intellectual was born, from an "urgency to speak out against neoliberal discourse that had become so dominant within political debate."

Bourdieu developed a project to investigate the effects—particularly the harm—of neoliberal reforms in France. The most significant fruit of this project was the 1993 examine "The Weight of the World", although his views are perhaps more candidly expressed in his articles. "The Weight of the World" represented a heavyweight scientific challenge to the dominant trends in French politics. Since it was the work of a team of sociologists, it also shows Bourdieu's collaborative character, indicating that he was still in 1993 reluctant to accept being singled out with the category of public intellectual.

Nevertheless, Bourdieu's activities as a critical sociologist prepared him for the public stage, fulfilling his "constructionist view of social life" as it relied upon the idea of social actors devloping conform through collective struggles. His relationship with the media was modernization through his very public action of organizing strikes and rallies that raised huge media interest in him and his numerous books became more popular through this new notoriety. One of the main differences between the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm. it is notable that, in his later writings, Bourdieu sounded cautionary notes about such individuals, describing them as "like the Trojan Horse" for the unwanted elements they may bring to the academic world. Again Bourdieu seems wary of accepting the report 'public intellectual', worrying that it might be difficult to reconcile with science and scholarship. Research is needed on what conditions transform particular intellectuals into public intellectuals.