Bourdieu, Pierre

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France, Paris, died on January 23, 2002, aged 71. His death made the headlines on the front page of Le Monde and inspired fulsome tributes from all walks of French public life—not least Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who had himself suffered the sting of Bourdieu's pen and tongue—and from the academic community worldwide. Arguably the last of the great French intellectuals active during the second half of the twentieth century, he remained active and productive to the end of his life.

Whether one admires Bourdieu—and he was capable of inspiring extraordinary loyalty and admiration—or not, his standing as an intellectual of genuinely global significance is beyond question. Widely regarded during his lifetime as internationally among the most important of social scientists, his theoretical legacy appears to be securely established (see Jenkins 2002 and Robbins 1999 for divergent assessments).

Within France, perhaps his major contribution to sociological development was to reject the increasingly aloof [Page 67]abstraction of the grand social theory that came to be associated with the existentialist, Marxist, and structuralist traditions during the 1960s and early 1970s. In response, Bourdieu asserted the absolute centrality to social thought of critical empirical research (and in this one suspects that his anthropological roots were showing). Philosophy and theory, particularly epistemology and the philosophy of science, were never neglected—given his intellectual formation and background, they could not be—but neither were the nuts and bolts of systematic inquiry.

From his institutional power base in the Centre de Sociologie Européene, he inspired and led a sustained programme of interconnected investigations into many aspects of French life. Early anthropological studies in Algeria and rural France were followed by sociological research, first on the urban proletariat in Algeria and subsequently in France, on topics as diverse as education, stratification, consumption and cultural taste, art, photography, literature, television, and journalism, rounded off by a final massive discipline—defying exploration of the experience of dispossession and exclusion. All of these projects were grist to his intellectual mill. Bourdieu is probably responsible, with Alain Touraine, for the reinvention of critical empirical social research in France.

In the best French tradition, Bourdieu did not neglect the wider context and problems of society, insisting vigorously on the right, indeed the duty, of the public intellectual to intervene in the politics and issues of the day, whether they were poverty, immigration, or globalisation. During the final decade of his life in particular, he appeared to be inspired to do better than the introspective and self-regarding intellectual politics for which le tout Paris had long been notorious. Some of his best and most accessible work is to be found in the polemical use of oral testimony in The Weight of the World (1999) (La misère du monde), which reads like a cross between Zola, Mayhew, and Terkel, or in the short pieces explicitly written as political interventions during this period. In some respects, not least in the language he used, he seemed to have found a new voice.

In the Anglophone world as well, one of Bourdieu's main contributions was to emphasise the necessary and mutual implication in each other of theory and empirical research. This was particularly important for a generation of young scholars on the broad left, such as the Birmingham school of cultural studies in Britain, who were seeking an exit from the sterility of increasingly labyrinthine Marxist theory and legitimation for actually getting their hands dirty in the field. Unlike much contemporary theory, Bourdieu's arguments were typically rooted in detailed research, taking in every option from ethnographic fieldwork to the large-scale social survey. Furthermore, his insistence on the indivisible unity of theory and research, and indeed, his insistence on a host of other things, was expressed in a language and tone of brook-no-argument certainty that offered a refreshing alternative to the fashionable indecision and relativism of postmodernism.

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