Margins
Firing Back book cover
Firing Back
Against the Tyranny of the Market 2
1998
First Published
3.78
Average Rating
110
Number of Pages
Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as "worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault," here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance . Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization's intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted. Bourdieu examines Europe's potential as a counterweight to America's globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the academic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value free. In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses American readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning antiglobalization movement.
Avg Rating
3.78
Number of Ratings
97
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Author · 37 books

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations. Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved