The influence of Pierre Bourdieu--one of the most protean intellectual
forces in contemporary French thought--extends far beyond is home
discipline of sociological research and thought. His work, presented in
over twenty books, lies on the borders of philosophy, anthropology and
ethnology, and cultural theory.
The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced
between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which
Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and
conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his
research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and
celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for
retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and
extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages of
his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural
lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added.
The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an
overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained.
The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of
Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series
of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory
that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein,
Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is
personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses
one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating
tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of
analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of
theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his
intellectual itinerary.
