Between 1954 and 1960, in the midst of the Algerian War, more than two million Algerian peasants - a quarter of the population - were forcibly resettled. They were removed from their homes and villages and relocated in camps controlled by the French military in what was one of the largest and most brutal displacements of a rural population in history. It was in this context of colonial violence that Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad set out to examine transformations in the fundamental structures of peasant economy and thought. By destroying the spatial and temporal frameworks of ordinary existence and reorganizing the life of peasants, the process of uprooting completed what the imperial policy of land confiscation and the spread of monetary exchange had started: the 'depeasantization' of agrarian communities stripped of the social and cultural means to make sense of the present and orient themselves to the future. This destruction of the traditional way of life was exacerbated by the quasi-urban conditions of the resettlement shantytowns, which brought about irreversible transformations in economic attitudes at the same time as they accelerated the contagion of needs, plunging the uprooted individuals into a 'traditionalism of despair' suited to daily survival in conditions of extreme uncertainty. Through their detailed analysis of these processes Bourdieu and Sayad provide a powerful account both of the destruction of a traditional way of life and of the brutal effects of colonial power. This classic text, now published in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics, migration studies, postcolonial studies and the social sciences and humanities generally, and to anyone concerned with the impact of colonization and its aftermath.

This is the fourth of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the College 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. Having elaborated the concepts of habitus and field in previous volumes, Bourdieu now undertakes an analysis of the relations between them, showing that social fields are objects of perception and knowledge for the agents engaged in them. The field of forces is the source of different visions of the social world, visions that are linked to agents' positions via the specific interests that motivate them and the habitus that is, at least partly, the product of the determining factors associated with their position. This relation between the world perceived and our cognitive structures explains why the social world commonly appears as self-evident. Visions of the social world are necessarily different and often antagonistic, and the field of forces is at once the source and the goal of struggles over its present and future being: the struggle for the legitimate principle of vision and division helps to transform or conserve the field of forces that underlies the agents' standpoints. An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu's most important ideas, this volume will be of great interest to 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 20th century.

In the late 1950s, like tens of thousands of young men of his generation, Pierre Bourdieu, having recently passed the agr gation in philosophy, found himself immersed in the Algerian war. Motivated by an impulse that, as he himself says, was civic rather than political', nothing seemed more important to him than to understand the Algerian situation and provide the elements that would enable others to come to an informed judgement about it. In extremely tough conditions and along with a small group of students, Bourdieu undertook a series of studies across an Algeria that was tightly patrolled by the army, leading him to discover the shocking reality of the resettlement camps and to analyse the mechanisms of destruction of Algerian society of which they were emblematic. To achieve the objectives he had set himself, Bourdieu had to carry out a genuine intellectual conversion, acquiring an ethnographic understanding of Algerian society, learning sociological analysis at a breakneck pace and inventing new instruments - both theoretical and empirical - that would enable him to understand the relations of domination specific to colonialism. These new tools also enabled him to analyse the nature of the crisis that the war had both produced and manifested. This unique volume brings together the first texts written by Bourdieu in the midst of the Algerian conflict, as well as later writings and interviews in which he returns to the topic of Algeria and the decisive role it played in the development of his work.

What is a 'symbolic revolution'? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Edouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the College de France. This volume of Bourdieu's previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet. Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the 'Impressionists', showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today the very categories that we use every day to understand the representations of the world and the world itself. This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be welcomed by students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber's famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The 'collective fiction' of the state D a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu's work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the College de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows 'another Bourdieu', both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of 'state thought' designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an 'anti-institutional mood' that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

Confined in their governmental offices and with their eyes fixed on the opinion polls, politicians and state officials are all too often oblivious to the lives of their citizens. On the other hand, the ordinary men and women who have so much hardship in their lives, and so few means to make themselves heard, are obliged either to protest outside the official frameworks or remain locked in the silence of their despair.

Under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, a team of sociologists spent three years analysing the new forms of social suffering that characterize contemporary societies - the suffering of those who are denied the means of acquiring a socially dignified existence, as well as the suffering of those who are poorly adjusted to the rapidly changing social and economic conditions of their lives.

Declining housing estates, the school, the family, street-level state services, the everyday world of social workers, teachers and policemen, factory workers and white-collar clerks, the universe of small farmers and artisans, of teachers and of the unemployed and partly employed: these are just some of the spaces where conflict occurs, where specific discriminations and recriminations, tensions and contradictions, abound and accumulate, and where new forms of suffering are produced and experienced by ordinary people in the course of their daily lives.

This book can be read like a series of short stories - the story of a steel worker who was laid off after twenty years in the same factory and who now struggles to support his family on unemployment benefits and a part-time job; the story of a trade unionist who finds his goals undermined by the changing nature of work; thestory of a family from Algeria living in a housing estate in the outskirts of Paris whose members have to cope with pervasive, everyday forms of racism; the story of a school teacher confronted with urban violence; and many others as well. Reading these stories enables one to understand these people's lives and the forms of social suffering which are part of them. And the reader will see that this book offers not only a distinctive method for analysing social life, but also another way of practising politics.

The publication of this book was a major social and political event in France, where it topped the best-seller list and triggered a wide-ranging public debate on inequality, politics and social solidarity. It will be essential reading for all those - including social scientists, educators, social and political activists and ordinary citizens - who are concerned about the current state of contemporary societies.

This volume brings together Bourdieu's highly original writings on language and on the relations between language, power and politics. Bourdieu develops a forceful critique of traditional approaches to language, including the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin and others. He argues that language should be viewed not only as a means of communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue their interests and display their practical competence.

Drawing on the concepts which are part of his distinctive theoretical approach, Bourdieu maintains that linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a 'linguistic market' and a 'linguistic habitus'. When individuals produce linguistic expressions, they deploy accumulated resources and they implicitly adapt their expressions to the demands of the social field or market. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant they may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.

Boudieu's account sheds fresh light on the ways in which linguistic usage varies according to considerations such as class and gender. It also opens up a new approach to the ways in which language is used in the domain of politics. For politics is, among other things, the site "par excellence" in which words are deeds and the symbolic character of power is at stake.

This volume, by one of the leading social thinkers in the world today, represents a major contribution to the study of language and power. It will be of interest to students throughout the social sciences andhumanities, especially in sociology, politics, anthropology, linguistics and literature.

Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as self-evident: supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality.

As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. And the individuals involved in the transaction are immersed in symbolic constructions which constitute, in a strong sense, the value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns.

The abstract and illusory nature of the assumptions of orthodox economic theory has been criticised by some economists, but Bourdieu argues that we must go further. Supply, demand, the market and even the buyer and seller are products of a process of social construction, and so-called 'economic' processes can be adequately described only by calling on sociological methods. Instead of seeing the two disciplines in antagonistic terms, it is time to recognize that sociology and economics are in fact part of a single discipline, the object of which is the analysis of social facts, of which economic transactions are in the end merely one aspect.

This brilliant study by the most original sociologist of post-war France will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, anthropology and related disciplines.

This is the second of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the College 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 focuses on two of his most important and influential concepts: habitus and field. For the social scientist, the object of study is neither the individual nor the group but the relation between these two manifestations of the social in bodies and in things: that is, the obscure, dual relation between the habitus - as a system of schemas of perception, appreciation and action - and the field as a system of objective relations and a space of possible actions and struggles aimed at preserving or transforming the field. The relation between the habitus and the field is a two-way process: it is a relation of conditioning, where the field structures the habitus, and it is also a relation of knowledge, with the habitus helping to constitute the field as a world that is endowed with meaning and value. The specificity of social science lies in the fact that it takes as its object of knowledge a reality that encompasses agents who take this same reality as the object of their own knowledge. An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu's most important concepts and ideas, 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 20th century.

In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word.

Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu's work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu's work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do.

This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu's thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.

This is the first of five volumes that will be based on lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the College 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, giving it his own distinctive twist. In doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well-known, such as field, capital and habitus, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practiced today. In this first volume, Bourdieu focuses on the fundamental social processes of naming and classifying the world, the ways that social actors use words to construct social objects and the struggles that arise from this. The sociologist encounters a world that is already named, already classified, where objects and social realities are marked by signs that have already been assigned to them. In order to avoid the naivete and confusion that stem from taking for granted a world that has been socially constituted, sociologists must examine the part played by words in the construction of social things - or, to put it differently, the contribution that classification struggles, a dimension of all class struggles, play in the constitution of classes, including classes of age, sex, race and social class. An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu's most important concepts and ideas, 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 20th century.

Over the last three decades, Pierre Bourdieu has produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory and research of the post war era. Yet, despite the his influence, no single introduction to his wide--ranging work is available. This book offers a systematic and accessible overview, providing interpretative keys to the internal logic of Bourdieua s work by explicating thematic and methodological principles underlying his work. Firstly Loic Wacquant provides a clear and systematic account of the main themes of Bourdieua s work, outlining his conception of knowledge, his theory of practice and his distinctive methods of analysis. In the second part of the book Wacquant collaborates with Bourdieu to discuss the central concepts of Bourdieua s work, confront some criticisms and objections, and develop Bourdieua s views on the relations between sociology, philosophy, history and politics. Finally Bourdieu displays his sociological approach in practice: beginning with the practical demands of research, he moves, step by step, to a formulation of the principles of sociological reason. Supplemented by an extensive and up--to--date bibliography, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Bourdieua s unique and outstanding contribution to contemporary social thought.

Between 1954 and 1960, in the midst of the Algerian War, more than two million Algerian peasants - a quarter of the population - were forcibly resettled. They were removed from their homes and villages and relocated in camps controlled by the French military in what was one of the largest and most brutal displacements of a rural population in history. It was in this context of colonial violence that Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad set out to examine transformations in the fundamental structures of peasant economy and thought. By destroying the spatial and temporal frameworks of ordinary existence and reorganizing the life of peasants, the process of uprooting completed what the imperial policy of land confiscation and the spread of monetary exchange had started: the 'depeasantization' of agrarian communities stripped of the social and cultural means to make sense of the present and orient themselves to the future. This destruction of the traditional way of life was exacerbated by the quasi-urban conditions of the resettlement shantytowns, which brought about irreversible transformations in economic attitudes at the same time as they accelerated the contagion of needs, plunging the uprooted individuals into a 'traditionalism of despair' suited to daily survival in conditions of extreme uncertainty. Through their detailed analysis of these processes Bourdieu and Sayad provide a powerful account both of the destruction of a traditional way of life and of the brutal effects of colonial power. This classic text, now published in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics, migration studies, postcolonial studies and the social sciences and humanities generally, and to anyone concerned with the impact of colonization and its aftermath.

In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word. Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu s work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu s work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do. This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu s thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.

In the late 1950s, like tens of thousands of young men of his generation, Pierre Bourdieu, having recently passed the agr gation in philosophy, found himself immersed in the Algerian war. Motivated by an impulse that, as he himself says, was civic rather than political', nothing seemed more important to him than to understand the Algerian situation and provide the elements that would enable others to come to an informed judgement about it. In extremely tough conditions and along with a small group of students, Bourdieu undertook a series of studies across an Algeria that was tightly patrolled by the army, leading him to discover the shocking reality of the resettlement camps and to analyse the mechanisms of destruction of Algerian society of which they were emblematic. To achieve the objectives he had set himself, Bourdieu had to carry out a genuine intellectual conversion, acquiring an ethnographic understanding of Algerian society, learning sociological analysis at a breakneck pace and inventing new instruments - both theoretical and empirical - that would enable him to understand the relations of domination specific to colonialism. These new tools also enabled him to analyse the nature of the crisis that the war had both produced and manifested. This unique volume brings together the first texts written by Bourdieu in the midst of the Algerian conflict, as well as later writings and interviews in which he returns to the topic of Algeria and the decisive role it played in the development of his work.

This is Bourdieu's long-awaited study of Flaubert and the formation of the modern literary field.

It was in the nineteenth century that the literary universe as we know it today took shape, as a space set apart from the approved academies of the state. No one could any longer dictate with authority what ought to be written, or decree the canons of good taste: recognition and consecration were produced in and through the struggle in which writers, critics and publishers confronted one another.

The aesthetic project of Gustave Flaubert was formed at the very moment when the literary field became autonomous. Through a careful analysis of the genesis and structure of the literary field, Bourdieu is able to show how the work of Flaubert was shaped by the different currents, movements, schools and authors of the time - how, in other words, Flaubert was the product of the very field that he helped to produce.

By uncovering the rules of art, the logic which writers and literary institutions obey and which expressed itself in a sublimated form in their works, Pierre Bourdieu shatters the illusion of the all-powerful creative genius. At the same time, he lays the foundations for a sociological analysis of literary works which would be concerned not only with the material production of the work itself, but also with the production of its value.

Widely praised in France, where the book was compared with Sartre's classic work on Flaubert, "The Rules of Art "will be extensively discussed in the English-speaking world. It will be recognized as one of the most important contributions of the last decade to the study of the social and historical conditions of literary works.

The enforced bachelorhood of eldest sons in traditional French rural society was a subject to which Pierre Bourdieu devoted three major articles, written at widely spaced moments in his career as a sociologist and ethnographer. He brings them together in this book, with an introduction in which he presents them as stages in a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman through which one can follow development of his theory of practice: from phenomenological observation and analysis of structures, through the notion of strategy (as opposed to rule), to the mature conceptual apparatus which subtly analyses the interrelations of field, symbolic capital and habitus in a unified matrimonial market which condemns the peasantry to irreversible decline. The opening scene, which is observed with the astute eye of a novelist at a country dance and which gives the book its title, can ultimately be seen as a paradigm of the collapse of traditional French rural society.

Masculine domination is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious that we hardly perceive all of its dimensions. It is so much in line with our expectations that we struggle to call it fully into question. Pierre Bourdieu's ethnographic analysis of gender divisions in Kabyle society, as a living reservoir of the Mediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument for disclosing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious which survives in the men and women of our own societies.

Bourdieu analyses masculine domination as a paradigmatic form of symbolic violence - the kind of gentle, invisible, pervasive violence which is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, often with the unwitting consent of the dominated. To understand this form of domination we must analyse both its invariant features and the historical work of dehistoricization through which social institutions - family, school, church, state - eternalize the arbitrary at the root of men's power. This analysis leads directly to the political question: can we neutralize the mechanisms through which history is continuously turned into nature, thereby freeing the forces of change and accelerating the incipient transformations of the relations between the sexes?

This new book by Pierre Bourdieu - which has been a bestseller in France - will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities and for anyone concerned with questions of gender, sexuality and power.

In this major work, Bourdieu examines the distinctive forms of power - political, intellectual, bureaucratic and economic - by means of which contemporary societies are governed. What kinds of competence are claimed by the bureaucrats and technocrats who administer our societies? And how do those who govern come to gain the recognition of those who are governed by them?

Bourdieu examines in detail the work of consecration which is carried out by the educational system - and especially in France by the grandes "ecoles," The work of consecration can be seen in operation in different historical periods, whenever a nobility is produced. Today the socially recognized groups function according to a logic similar to that which characterized the divisions between high and low in the "ancien regime." Today this state nobility is the heir - structural and sometimes even genealogical - of the "noblesse de "robe which, in order to consolidate its position in relation to other forms of power, had to construct the modern state and the republican myths, meritocracy and civil service which went along with it.

Bourdieu examines the mechanisms which produce the kind of nobility displayed by those who govern, and the recognition granted to them by those who are governed by them.

'This is not an autobiography.' Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu's commitment to a reflexive sociology led him ineluctably to take on the final challenge of a self socio-analysis in which he recounts and analyses, more fully and intimately than ever before, his understanding of the trajectory that led him from the peasant world of Barn, through sometimes painful years as a lyce boarder, as a student in 1950s Paris and as a conscript in the Algerian War, to the pinnacle of the French intellectual and academic world. 'This is not an autobiography,' he said of this work but it reveals much of the hitherto implicit experience of his formative years, and gives precious insights into his relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault and many others, which deepen our understanding of his unique contribution to sociology and anthropology.

One of the worlda s leading social thinkers, Bourdieua s work has become increasingly influential throughout the social sciences and humanities. In this new book he embarks on a sociological analysis of science and its legitimacy. Bourdieu argues that that emergence of the social sciences has had the effect of calling in to question the objectivity and validity of scientific activity, by relating it to its historic conditions. It is this relativistic and at times nihilistic interpretation of science that Bourdieu sets out to challenge, in an attempt to combine an accurate vision of the scientific arena with a realist theory of knowledge. The book also offers an elaboration of Bourdieua s notion of the scientific field and uses it to address a range of issues and debates in the natural and social sciences. This is a clear and accessible introduction to Bourdieua s views on science that will appeal to students of sociology, philosophy and the social sciences.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The collective fiction of the state D a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the College de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows another Bourdieu , both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of state thought designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an anti-institutional mood that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

In this new volume Pierre Bourdieu - one of the foremost social thinkers of our time - clarifies and elaborates the most fundamental characteristics of his theoretical approach.

Bourdieu's theory is both a relational philosophy of science dedicated to revealing the objective relations which shape and underpin social life, and a philosophy of action which takes account of agents' dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of key concepts - habitus, field, capital - and it is defined by the two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus.

The key concepts and assumptions of Bourdieu's approach are exemplified in this volume through a variety of concrete analyses, from a discussion of the formation of the modern state to an account of the family as a site of social reproduction, from an analysis of the economy of symbolic goods to a reflection on the social conditions of political morality.

An excellent and accessible introduction to the work of Bourdieu, "Practical Reason" will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics and philosophy, and throughout the social sciences and humanities generally.

In this major work, Bourdieu pushes the critique of scholastic reason to a point which most questionings leave untouched, making explicit the presuppositions entailed by the situation of "skhole," the free time, liberated from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to the world. And it is philosophers who, not content with engaging these presuppositions in their practice, have brought them into the order of discourse, not so much to analyse them as to legitimate them.

This critique of scholastic reason can be made in the name of Pascal because his thought expressed the features of human existence which the scholastic outlook ignores - his concern with symbolic power, his refusal of the ambition of foundation, his attention, devoid of all populist naivety, to 'ordinary people' and his determination to seek the "raison d'etre" of the seemingly most illogical behaviour rather than condemning or mocking it. Through this Pascalian critique, Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy which calls into question our most fundamental presuppositions and renews the traditional interrogation of violence, power, time, history, the universal and even the purpose and direction of existence, with a debt to the heretical philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey and Peirce.