Master thinker who shaped France’s intellectual life
Pierre Bourdieu, born in 1930, was one of the master thinkers who shaped French intellectual life. During the last decade of his life, he abandoned his customary public reticence to engage in dialogue on controversial political issues (resuscitating the old debate over the public role of intellectuals which seemed to have died along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault), and often joined protest movements against social injustice. In the mid-1990s, Bourdieu, then a distinguished professor at the College de France, openly sided with striking rail-workers, spoke out for the homeless, and supported the cause of illegal immigrants (les sans papiers). He was a staunch critic of neoliberal globalization. One of his main themes concerns the way in which a system of power is maintained through the transmission of a dominant culture. For Bourdieu, culture and education are central to the affirmation of differences and in the reproduction of those differences. Cultural production helps perpetuate the dominant structure of society. Starting from the premise that the struggle for social distinction is a fundamental parameter of social life, Bourdieu discerns three types of capital that one must have in order to enhance his or her social status: economic capital (wealth, what Marx refers to as capital), social capital (networks of connections), and cultural capital (family background, social class and so on). A fourth type, symbolic capital, is the form assumed by these different forms of capital when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate. Bourdieu’s thoughts represent a break from Marx as he expands the notion of capital to include immaterial, that is non-economic, forms of capital. But again, understanding the various forms of capital helps one decipher the workings of society – why some people dominate others. He wrote more than 25 influential books and published more than 500 articles in a variety of journals.
