Pierre Bourdieu

P. Bourdieu is a French sociologist, born in Argelia in 1930, who has developed a theory capable of being applied on several social phenomena, like politics, culture, economy and others related with them (culture: sciences, media, religion, etc; politics: politic positions, democracy, etc; economy: social classes, exchange, etc). He has a lot of publications, but the capital ones are The practical sense and The distinction. In each one of his works, Bourdieu apply the same scheme that makes him a absolute reference for the sociology field (especially for the culture or symbolic sociology): the social fact and the behavior of the people are directly related neither to an omnipresent structure nor to the free will of agents, but to a “mixture of both of them”; the correct concepts to explain the social phenomena are “field” and “habitus”… people act on fields (of any of the aspects of society) with specific inner rules that people “respect” but, on the other hand, the habitus, the “biography” (in very simple words) merge with the rules of the field: both elements “touch” each other, developing the social phenomena as it express. In short, he searches for a way to eliminate the classical sociologist dichotomy between structure and individual action. Which is very useful to learn about ”social things” that appear to be strange, irrational, but, if they’re “correctly seen”, indeed appear to be reasonable.

Pierre Bourdieu dies reciently, in Paris, in January 23th of 2002, victim of cancer.