Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu is the most distinguished French sociologist working today. This is the first full length study explicitly designed to make his dense and complicated thought easily accessible to a student audience. Written in a clear style, the author adopts a critical stance to Bourdieu, covering the full range of his work from the early Algerian fieldwork, to the massive surveys of French cultural consumption, to his most recent theoretical essays. Richard Jenkins places Pierre Bourdieu's sociological thought in its context of French intellectual life since the 1950s and presents a critique which acknowledges Bourdieu's massive achievement while at the same time recognises the shortcomings and problems of his work. Jenkins covers all the main substantive areas about which Bourdieu has written - culture, education, social stratification, language and the ethnography of the Algerian peasantry - but the main emphasis is upon his contributions to theory, methodology and epistemology. Jenkins argues that Bourdieu's importance consists in his attempts to transcend the dualism of objectivism and subjectivism, to acknowledge the processes by means of which sociological accounts are constructed, and to produce a non-determinist account of social life - these are the enterprises which make Bourdieu's work an inspiration for the development of a reflexive, critical social science.