Politics and Sociology

This is the fifth and final volume based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège 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, and in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts which have come to define his distinctive intellectual approach. In this volume, Bourdieu develops his view of the social world as the site of a struggle for the legitimate vision of the world, a struggle in which the agents confronting one another are unequally armed.  The specific weapon used in these struggles is what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which is economic, cultural or social capital when perceived through suitable categories of perception.  All forms of power seek to impose their own categories of perception in a way that is both recognized and misrecognized.  This is how forms of power establish themselves as legitimate, because legitimacy is a force of recognition based on misrecognition, that is, recognized insofar as it prevents us from recognizing the arbitrariness at the source of its efficacy. By rejecting the opposition between structuralist objectification and subjectivist constructivism, sociology, on Bourdieu’s account, can seek to grasp both the objective structure of social fields and the properly political strategies that agents produce in order to establish and impose their viewpoint.  And it can do this without forgetting that the whole world of social construction, whereby agents participate in producing social realities and inscribing them into the lasting objectivity of structures, is oriented by the perception they have of the social world, which depends on their position in these structures and their dispositions, themselves fashioned by the structures. An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu’s most important ideas, the five volumes of this series will be of great value to students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu’s work across the social sciences and humanities, and they will be of interest to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the 20th century.