Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist who began with fieldwork in Algeria and ended as professor at the Collège de France. In Distinction he used large-scale surveys of French cultural preferences to argue that taste in art, food and manners is not a natural gift but a learned disposition that marks and reproduces class position. His concepts of habitus, field and cultural capital are widely used in philosophy of art, social theory and education.

Key ideas

• Taste classifies those who exercise it: aesthetic preferences signal and reproduce social position.
• Habitus is the set of embodied dispositions through which social conditions shape perception and action.
• Cultural capital, such as education and familiarity with legitimate culture, works alongside economic capital.
• Social life is organised into fields, each with its own stakes and forms of recognition.

Major works

• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, 1972)
• Distinction (La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement, 1979)
• The Logic of Practice (Le Sens pratique, 1980)
• Homo Academicus (1984)

In the conversation

• Debate Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it Hugo Marchetti · 5 replies
• Question Is the Sanskrit sahṛdaya the same ideal critic as Hume’s “true judge”? Kavya Menon · 4 replies