Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory
of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be
a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public
intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his.
Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion
volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of
becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering,
and military research--that it risks falling under the control of
industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and
profit.
Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line
between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to
intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science
and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science
develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from
relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition
of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological
analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing
transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main
currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and
he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political
and economic forces.
A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and
a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and
Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious
careers in the field of sociology.
