Pierre Bourdieu, a Heroic Structuralism

Jean-Louis Fabiani’s recent book, Pierre Bourdieu: Un Structuralisme héroïque, offers a remarkable intellectual portrait of the great French sociologist, and has been very well received in France as a major contribution to understanding Bourdieu’s work. Fabiani traces the genealogy of Bourdieu’s major concepts-le champ, la distinction, le capital-and the genesis of his method within the space of the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. He portrays Bourdieu as a kind of tragic hero who never gave up on the idea, following Emile Durkheim, that sociology should be able to establish a general theory of society.
Event co-sponsored by the Maison Française and Department of Sociology.