51 Facts About Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual.

Pierre Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations.

Pierre Bourdieu was a prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English.

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education.

Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin, in southern France, to a postal worker and his wife.

In 1962, Pierre Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons, Jerome, Emmanuel, and Laurent.

Pierre Bourdieu was educated at the Lycee Louis-Barthou in Pau before moving to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

Pierre Bourdieu's biographers write that he chose not to enter the Reserve Officer's College like many of his fellow ENS graduates as he wished to stay with people from his own modest social background.

Pierre Bourdieu later drew heavily on this fieldwork in his 1972 book Outline of a Theory of Practice, a strong intervention into anthropological theory.

Pierre Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research and his work can be seen as sociology of culture or, as he described it, a "Theory of Practice".

Pierre Bourdieu extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, financial capital, and symbolic capital.

That capital includes the value of social networks, which Pierre Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.

In 1960, Pierre Bourdieu returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the University of Lille, where he remained until 1964.

From 1964 onwards Pierre Bourdieu held the position of Professor in the VIe section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and from 1981 the Chair of Sociology at the College de France.

In 1968, Pierre Bourdieu took over the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, founded by Aron, which he directed until his death.

Much of Pierre Bourdieu's work observes the role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency.

Pierre Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society.

Pierre Bourdieu criticized the importance given to economic factors in the analysis of social order and change.

Pierre Bourdieu stressed, instead, that the capacity of actors to impose their cultural reproductions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of dominant social structures.

Pierre Bourdieu was opposed to the intellectualist tradition and stressed that social domination and cultural reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the society.

Pierre Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Choice Theory because he believed it was a misunderstanding of how social agents operate.

Pierre Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional anthropology and sociology which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory.

From Emile Durkheim, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu inherited a certain structuralist interpretation of the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves, based on the analysis of symbolic structures and forms of classification.

However, Pierre Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders.

Pierre Bourdieu furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Pierre Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions.

Pierre Bourdieu's work is built upon an attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which he thought characterized the social sciences of his time.

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of habitus, which exerted a considerable influence in the social sciences.

When Pierre Bourdieu instead asks that dispositions be considered, he is making a very subtle intervention in sociology, asserting a middle ground where social laws and individual minds meet and is arguing that the proper object of sociological analysis should be this middle ground: dispositions.

For Pierre Bourdieu, habitus was essential in resolving a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism.

Pierre Bourdieu wanted to effectively unite social phenomenology and structuralism.

Pierre Bourdieu thus sees habitus as an important factor contributing to social reproduction, because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life.

Proper research, Pierre Bourdieu argues, thus cannot do without these two together.

Pierre Bourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity, only when certain necessary historical conditions are met.

An important part of Pierre Bourdieu's theory is that the historical development of a scientific field, sufficiently autonomous to be described as such and to produce objective work, is an achievement that requires continual reproduction.

Pierre Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity.

The sociologist, according to Pierre Bourdieu, must engage in a "sociology of sociology" so as not to unwittingly attribute to the object of observation the characteristics of the subject.

Pierre Bourdieu describes how the "scholastic point of view" unconsciously alters how scientists approach their objects of study.

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the notion of capital, defined as sums of particular assets put to productive use.

Pierre Bourdieu developed theories of social stratification based on aesthetic taste in his 1979 work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, published by Harvard University Press.

Pierre Bourdieu asserts the primacy of social origin and cultural capital by claiming that social capital and economic capital, though acquired cumulatively over time, depend upon it.

Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu believes that "the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning" would probably be in the tastes of food.

Educational success, according to Pierre Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviour, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait, dress, or accent.

Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural capital has developed in opposition to economic capital.

Pierre Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but a mechanism of power.

In France, Pierre Bourdieu was seen not as an ivory tower academic or "cloistered don" but as a passionate activist for those he believed to be subordinated by society.

For Pierre Bourdieu, sociology was a combative effort that sought to expose the un-thought structures that lie beneath the physical and thought practices of social agents.

Pierre Bourdieu saw sociology as a means of confronting symbolic violence and of exposing those unseen areas in which one could be free.

Pierre Bourdieu's work is widely cited, and many sociologists and other social scientists work explicitly in a Bourdieusian framework.

Pierre Bourdieu played a crucial role in the popularisation of correspondence analysis and particularly multiple correspondence analysis.

Pierre Bourdieu held that these geometric techniques of data analysis are, like his sociology, inherently relational.