The Forms of Capital

By Pierre Bourdieu

2011

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4.10

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107

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3H16M

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This is the third of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collége de France in the early 1980s under the title General Sociology . In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline; in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well known, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practised today. In this volume, Bourdieu focuses on one of these key concepts, capital, which forms part of the trilogy of concepts – habitus, capital, field – that define the core of his theoretical approach. A field, as a social space of relatively durable relations between agents and institutions, is also a site of specific investments, which presupposes the possession of specific forms of capital and secures both material and symbolic profits. While there are many different forms of capital, two are fundamental and effective in all social economic capital and cultural capital. These and other forms of capital exist only in relation to the fields in which they are the distribution of the forms and quantities of capital constitutes the structure of the field within which agents act and they confer power over the field, over the mechanisms that define the functioning of the field and over the profits engendered in the field – over, for example, the transmission of cultural capital in the educational system. An ideal introduction to one of Bourdieu’s most important concepts, this volume will be of great interest to the many students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu’s work across the social sciences and humanities, and to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the twentieth century.

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Author

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).