In the last decade of his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu became involved in a series of high-profile political interventions, defending the cause of striking students and workers, speaking out in the name of illegal immigrants, the homeless and the unemployed, challenging the incursion of the market into the field of artistic and intellectual production.

The first sustained analysis of Bourdieu's politics, this study seeks to assess the validity of his claims as to the distinctiveness and superiority of his own field theory as a tool of political analysis.

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in contemporary French economy, culture and society. Engaging with work in political economy and sociology, the book sketches a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of these profound changes. It examines the challenges such changes have posed to fundamental French republican values, arguing they have opened up a rift between older notions of French republican citizenship and the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour. The book traces the symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, social classes, and ethnicities.

In the last decade of his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu became involved in a series of high-profile political interventions, defending the cause of striking students and workers, speaking out in the name of illegal immigrants, the homeless and the unemployed, challenging the incursion of the market into the field of artistic and intellectual production. The first sustained analysis of Bourdieu's politics, this study seeks to assess the validity of his claims as to the distinctiveness and superiority of his own field theory as a tool of political analysis.

This study of the work of the influential French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu places his work firmly in the context of developments both in the French post-war intellectual field an din post-war French society as a whole. Set against the background of rapid change and upheaval that has characterised post-war French society, culture and politics, Bourdieu's work can be seen as offering a peculiarly perceptive analysis of France's problematic transition to an era of late capitalism. Proceeding thematically, this study traces the development of Bourdieu's thought, elucidating the relationship between the anthropological and sociological aspects of his work, examining his debt to Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, and highlighting his antagonistic relationship with a series of contemporary intellectual figures and movements - Barthes, Lefebvre, Touraine, Sartre, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida, structuralism and post-structuralism.