What you call good taste quietly signals your class, argued Pierre Bourdieu
Deciding what counts as beautiful, refined or vulgar feels personal. For Pierre Bourdieu, such judgements quietly mark where people stand in society. His 1979 book Distinction, built from surveys, photographs and interviews, argued taste is social positioning, and sociologists later ranked it among the century's most important works.
Bourdieu was born on 1 August 1930 in Denguin, in southwest France, to a postal worker; the family spoke Béarnese, a Gascon dialect. He climbed through lycées in Pau and Paris to the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser. Conscripted in 1955, he declined officer training so he could stay among men of his own modest background, and was sent to Algeria during its war of independence.
He stayed on as a lecturer in Algiers and studied Kabyle society, producing The Sociology of Algeria in 1958, a success in France, and later drawing on that fieldwork for Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972. After Lille he became a director of studies in Paris in 1964, took over Raymond Aron's Centre de Sociologie Européenne in 1968, launched a research journal in 1975, and in 1981 took the sociology chair at the Collège de France once held by Aron and Maurice Halbwachs.
His toolkit rests on three ideas. Habitus is the set of embodied dispositions people absorb from their background. A field is a social arena with its own stakes. Capital comes in several forms beyond money: cultural, social and symbolic, each convertible into advantage. With them he showed how elites pass privilege down generations while schooling appears to offer equal chances, and he named symbolic violence the process by which an arbitrary social order comes to look natural. He drew on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Merleau-Ponty, called Wittgenstein a saviour in times of intellectual distress, and rejected rational choice theory.
Early on he warned against sociologists playing politics and scorned Jean-Paul Sartre's style of public intervention. Yet in the 1990s he became one of France's most visible intellectuals, attacking neoliberalism and describing sociology as a martial art. He won the CNRS gold medal in 1993 and died of cancer on 23 January 2002, aged 71.
Source: Pierre Bourdieu
