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).
Series
Books
Practical Reason
On the Theory of Action
1994
Firing Back
Against the Tyranny of the Market 2
1998
The Rules of Art
Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
1992
Homo Academicus
1984
The Social Structures of the Economy
2000
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
1992
The State Nobility
Elite Schools in the Field of Power
1989
Ce que parler veut dire
L'économie des échanges linguistiques
1982
Pascalian Meditations
1997
The Logic of Practice
1980
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
1970
El sentido social del gusto
Elementos para una sociología de la cultura
2003
Sociology in Question
1993
Questions of Sociology
1980
On Television
1996
The Bachelors' Ball
The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn
2002
Sketch for a Self-Analysis
2004
Academic Discourse
Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power
1994
Les héritiers. Les étudiants et la culture
1964
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
1987
Sociology is a Martial Art
Political Writings by Pierre Bourdieu
2010
Picturing Algeria
2003
Outline of a Theory of Practice
1972
On the State
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 - 1992
2012
Political Interventions
Social Science and Political Action
2002
The Weight of the World
Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
1993
Manet
A Symbolic Revolution
2013
In Other Words
Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology
1987
The Field of Cultural Production
1993
The Forms of Capital
2011
The Love of Art
European Art Museums and Their Public
1966
Acts of Resistance
Against the New Myths of our Time
1998
Photography
A Middle-Brow Art
1965
Science of Science and Reflexivity
2001
Masculine Domination
1998
Distinction
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
1979
Language and Symbolic Power
1982
