Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

A large work of sociology, built on surveys of French tastes carried out in the 1960s, that answers Kant's philosophy of aesthetic judgement with empirical evidence. Bourdieu argues that taste in art, music, food, clothing, sport and furniture is not a matter of personal preference or innate sensibility but is shaped by social position, and in turn marks and reproduces it. Taste classifies people, and it classifies those who make the classifications. To explain this he develops several concepts: cultural capital, the knowledge, manners and credentials passed on by family and school; habitus, the lasting dispositions that make some choices feel natural; and social space, mapped by the overall volume of capital people hold and its mix of economic and cultural forms. The dominant class shows a detached aesthetic of form, while working-class taste is described as a taste of necessity. A postscript offers a vulgar critique of Kant's pure aesthetic. Critics question how far French findings generalise.

Cultural capital and habitus are now everyday tools in sociology and education, and the book shows how judgements of good taste quietly sort people by class.