BOURDIEU PIERRE

(P/B) DISTINCTION
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 ...
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(P/B) THE SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF THE ECONOMY
Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as self-evident: supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality. As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, ...
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(P/B) THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
This book can be read like a series of short stories - the story of a steel worker who was laid off after twenty years in the same factory and who now struggles to support his family on unemployment benefits and a part-time job; the story of a trade unionist who finds his goals undermined by the changing nature of work; the story of a family from Algeria living in a housing estate in the outskirts of Paris whose members have to cope with pervasive, everyday forms of racism; the story of a school teacher confronted with urban violence; and ...
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(P/B) THE STATE NOBILITY
In this major work, Bourdieu examines the distinctive forms of power - political, intellectual, bureaucratic and economic - by means of which contemporary societies are governed. What kinds of competence are claimed by the bureaucrats and technocrats who administer our societies? And how do those who govern come to gain the recognition of those who are governed by them? Bourdieu examines in detail the work of consecration which is carried out by the educational system - and especially in France by the grandes ecoles. The work of consecrati...
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(H/B) WHAT IS A PEOPLE?
"What Is a People?" seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we,"...
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ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ ΚΑΙ ΤΙΣ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΕΣ ΧΡΗΣΕΙΣ ΤΗΣ
(. . .) Τα «επιστημονικά πεδία», είναι σύμφωνα με τον Pierre Bourdieu, ο τόπος της αναγκαίας αντιπαράθεσης μεταξύ δύο μορφών εξουσίας που αντιστοιχούν σε δύο είδη «επιστημονικού κεφαλαίου»: ενός κεφαλαίου, που μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί ως κοινωνικό και που είναι συνδεδεμένο με την κατοχή υψηλών θέσεων στους επιστημονικούς θεσμούς, και ενός ειδικού κεφαλαίου, που βασίζεται στην αναγνώριση από τους ομοίους. Και δεδομένου ότι η επιστημονική καινοτομία δεν νοείται χωρίς ρήξεις με τα ισχύοντα προαπαιτούμενα, το ειδικό επιστημονικό κεφάλαιο είναι...
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(P/B) THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION
The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's most important writings on art, literature and aesthetics. Bourdieu develops a highly 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 twentieth 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. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural...
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(P/B) HOMO ACADEMICUS
This highly acclaimed work, in which Pierre Bourdieu turns his attention to the academic world and offers a brilliant analysis of modern intellectual culture, is now available in paperback. The academy is shown to be not just a realm of dialogue and debate, but also a sphere of power in which reputations and careers are made, defended and destroyed. Bourdieu constructs a map of the intellectual field in France and analyzes the forms of capital power, the lines of conflict and the patterns of change which characterize the system of higher e...
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(P/B) THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER
This book is an important and timely contribution to the debate concerning the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his political affiliations to Nazism. But it is more than that: it is also a study, by the leading sociologist in France today, of some of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Drawing on his distinctive methods of analysis, Bourdieu argues that philosophical discourse - like all discourse - is the result of an interaction between an expressive drive and the censorship gene...
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(P/B) ACTS OF RESISTANCE
In his most explicitly political work to date, Pierre Bourdieu speaks out against the new myths of our time - especially those associated with neo-liberalism - and offers a passionate defence of the public interest. The withdrawal of the state from many areas of social life in recent years - housing, health, social services, etc. - has produced growing despair in the most deprived sections of the population; the dismantling of public welfare in the name of private enterprise, flexible markets and global competitiveness is increasing the mi...
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(P/B) PASCALIAN MEDITATIONS
In this major new work, Bourdieu pushes the critique of scholastic reason to a point which most questionings leave untouched....
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(P/B) THE RULES OF ART
This is Bourdieu's long-awaited study of Flaubert and the formation of the modern literary field, it is an important contribution to the study of the social and historical conditions of literary works....
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(H/B) PICTURING ALGERIA
As a soldier in the French army, Pierre Bourdieu took thousands of photographs documenting the abject conditions and suffering (as well as the resourcefulness, determination, grace, and dignity) of the Algerian people as they fought in the Algerian War (1954-1962). Sympathizing with those he was told to regard as "enemies", Bourdieu became deeply and permanently invested in their struggle to overthrow French rule and the debilitations of poverty. Upon realizing the inability of his education to make sense of this wartime reality, Bourdieu ...
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(P/B) ON TELEVISION
A surprising bestseller when it was first published in France, this little book by Pierre Bourdieu offers a brilliant critique of television and its consequences for social and political life. Rather than simply denouncing television as a misrepresentation or trivialization of the social world, Bourdieu shows that television journalists are part of a journalistic field that shapes their actions and imposes a particular vision on the public, a vision that is grounded in the very structure of the journalistic field and that, through a variet...
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OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE (P/B)
''Outline of a theory of practice'' is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theore...
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(P/B) SCIENCE OF SCIENCE AND REFLEXIVITY
One of the world's leading social thinkers, Bourdieu's work has become increasingly influential throughout the social sciences and humanities. In this new book he embarks on a sociological analysis of science and its legitimacy. Bourdieu argues that that emergence of the social sciences has had the effect of calling in to question the objectivity and validity of scientific activity, by relating it to its historic conditions. It is this relativistic and at times nihilistic interpretation of science that Bourdieu sets out to challenge, in an...
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(P/B) THE BACHELORS' BALL
Continuing the theme of self-reflection, Bourdieu's final book, The Bachelors' Ball, sees him return to Bearn, the region in which he grew up, to examine the gender dynamics of rural France. This personal connection adds poignancy to Bourdieu's ethnographic account of the way the influence of urban values has precipitated a crisis for male peasants. Tied to the land through inheritance, these bachelors find themselves with little to offer the women of Bearn who, like the young Bourdieu himself, abandon the country for the city in droves. (...
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(P/B) FIRING BACK

(P/B) REPRODUCTION IN EDUCATION, SOCIETY AND CULTURE
The way in which the ruling ideas of a social system are related to structures of class, production and power, and how these are legitimated and perpetuated, is fundamental to the sociological project. In this second edition of this classic text, which includes a new introduction by Pierre Bourdieu, the authors develop an analysis of education (in its broadest sense, encompassing more than the process of formal education). They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme which is actually, though not in appearance, ...
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(P/B) AN INVITATION TO REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY
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 interpretative keys to the internal logic of Bourdieu's work by explicating thematic and methodological principles underlying his work. Firstly Loic Wacquant provides a clear and systematic account of the main themes of Bourdieu's...
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