Pierre Bourdieu 1930 – 2002

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher whose work fundamentally reshaped the twentieth-century social sciences. Drawing on long ethnographic work in Algeria during the war of independence and on extensive empirical study of French education and culture, he developed the concepts of habitus, field, and cultural capital that have become standard vocabulary in sociology, education, and anthropology. Distinction, his analysis of how taste operates as a marker and reproducer of class, is one of the most cited social-science books of the late twentieth century. He was a public intellectual of considerable political weight in his last years.

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in Denguin, a village in the Bearn region of southwestern France, the son of a village postman. After the Lycee Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole normale superieure in Paris he was sent to Algeria in 1955 for military service and stayed on as an assistant in sociology at the University of Algiers, conducting the fieldwork that produced his early works on Kabyle society and the colonial situation.

Returning to France he taught at Lille and from 1964 at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes; he founded the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975 and was elected to the chair of sociology at the College de France in 1981. His major works include The Inheritors (with Passeron, 1964), Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Distinction (1979), Homo Academicus (1984), The Logic of Practice (1980), Language and Symbolic Power (1991), The Rules of Art (1992), Pascalian Meditations (1997), and the interventions of his late years against neoliberalism.

Bourdieu's conceptual armory — habitus, field, social and cultural capital, symbolic violence, the strategies of reproduction — gave the social sciences a unified vocabulary for analyzing how structures of inequality reproduce themselves through the apparently free choices of agents. By the time of his death in Paris in January 2002 he was the most cited social scientist in the world.