Pierre Bourdieu: A Life Dedicated To Understanding The Practices Of Power

Pierre Bourdieu was an influential figure in French intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. His work is dominated by the sociological analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies.

Bourdieu is well known for pioneering terms like “symbolic violence,” “cultural capital,” and “habitus. ” Next we take a tour of his thought and his main works.

Life

Pierre Bourdieu was born on August 1, 1930 in Denguin, (Pyrenees-Atlantiques, France) in a poor home and was an only child. His grandfather was a sharecropper and his father started out as a postman until, later, he became a postmaster. Pierre grew up in the small French town and attended a nearby public high school, before moving to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

The young Bourdieu studied Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. After finishing his university studies, he got a job at Moulins High School. In this school, he worked as a philosophy teacher for a year. During this period, Bourdieu fulfilled his military obligations and, despite refusing to receive training as a Cadet Reserve Officer, managed to position himself at Versailles, in the service of the psychological forces.

Pierre took advantage of his undeniable writing skills, served in the administration of the General Assembly of Residence, under the command of Robert Lacoste. Between 1958 and 1960, Bourdieu conducted extensive ethnographic research during the Algerian war.

Bourdieu studied the conflict through the Kabyle people. The results of this study were published in his first book,  Sociologie de L’Algerie ( Sociology of Algeria ). This work laid the foundation for his sociological reputation.

Work of Pierre Bourdieu

In 1960, after his stay in Algiers, Bourdieu returned to Paris and resumed his work as a teacher at the University of Lille, where he worked until 1964. From 1964, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

After the social upheaval of May 1968, Pierre founded the Center for the Sociology of Education and Culture. This Center was attached to the Center for European Sociology, the research center that he directed from 1985 until his death.

In 1975, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. This magazine was important for transforming the accepted canons of sociological production. In addition, the journal contributed to raising the scientific rigor of sociology. That same year, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron, he published the book The Heirs , a work that undoubtedly lays the foundations for his success. Since 1981, he was a professor at the renowned Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.

Bourdieu, in addition to his teaching work, developed a great editorial work that allowed him to spread his thought. Recognitions for his work were not long in coming and Bordieu was awarded numerous national and international awards for his career.

In 1993, Pierre Bourdieu was the first sociologist to receive the Médaille d’or du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Award from the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly after, in 2002, he received the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and they had three children: Jerónimo, Emmanuel, and Lauren. In the mid-1960s, he moved with his family to Antony, a southern suburb of Paris. He died of cancer in 2002. According to the Parisian daily Le Monde , Bourdieu has been the most cited French intellectual in the world press.

The cultural legacy

Bourdieu was an avid political activist and a staunch opponent of modern forms of globalization. His work employed methods that spanned a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. The scholar saw sociology as a weapon against social oppression and injustice.

Bourdieu used the weapons of the intellect to discover hitherto unknown mechanisms that contributed to perpetuating the existing separation and inequalities between different social groups. He dedicated his life to fighting for a better world for all.

Bourdieu’s speech is accentuated in the last years of his life with new arguments against neoliberalism. In addition, he fought in favor of civil society and the nascent world social forum.

The thinker was actively involved with the unions and various NGOs. He stayed close to movements defending immigrants and civic associations against neoliberal positions.

Perhaps one of the most significant steps that Bourdieu took was to contribute two new concepts linked to sociology:  habitus and field, in addition to reinventing the concept of capital.

His legacy to universal thought: symbolic capital

Pierre Bourdieu postulated a series of controversial concepts, which were criticized for their determinism.

A good example is the sociologist’s thesis that the school works by reproducing family, social and class differences. This function is carried out when it selects and legitimizes the individuals who are best culturally endowed due to their family origin. In this sense, according to Bordieu, school is a means for social advancement but, at the same time, it is a tool for marginalization and discrimination.

Through this line of analysis, Bourdieu concludes that the social status of the middle classes is based on resources extracted from the educational system. Being its main capital the cultural one.

Bourdieu distinguishes between economic, social and cultural capital. Social capital provides social ties, prestige, and belonging. For its part, social capital accumulates collectively, but in a highly selective and exclusive way.

For Bourdieu, all capitals tend to become economic capital. The ultimate meaning of the accumulation of the different types of capital is to improve the holding of symbolic capital.

The possession of the different types of capital defines the location of the person on a map that draws different social spaces, also called the field. The social distances between structures define the so-called social classes, which would “integrate” obeying the different distributions of economic and social capital especially.

These spaces or fields are occupied by agents with different habitus and with different capitals. These agents both for the material and symbolic resources of the field.

Theory of power: symbolic violence

Bourdieu postulated that the naturalization of the social world obeys a form of domination based on symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu, this symbolic violence is exercised by those who suffer it. It is they who perpetuate it, having internalized it as a feature of their own identity.

This postulate proposes that this is the mechanism by which the forms of domination derived from the asymmetric distribution of capital are symbolically reproduced and naturalized.