Distinction Pierre Bourdieu

Result of a titanic work of empirical research that combines diverse statistical and ethnographic methods, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste is the most important work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Published in 1979, this book puts into practice the most important Bourdieusian theoretical battery (Habitus, Field, Social Space and Cultural Capital) in a terrain of sociological reflection almost unexplored at the time: the taste. Based on material from numerous surveys on cultural consumption in France during the 1970s, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu strongly criticizes the idea of ​​common sense, and certain philosophical and literary traditions, which attribute the formation of (good/ bad) taste to human nature.

On the contrary, the author highlights the strong statistical correlation between the appropriation of cultural goods (music, painting, photography, eating habits, sports, etc.), the level of instruction and the social origin. In other words: “The title of the work is there to remember that what we commonly call distinction, that is, a certain quality, that does not exist but in and for the relationship with other properties”.

Testimonials

“A complex, rich, intelligent book. It will provide the historian of the future with priceless materials and it will bring an essential con­tribution to sociological theory.”

Fernand Braudel

“One of the more distinguished contributions to social theory and research in recent years … There is in this book an account of culture, and a methodology of its study, rich in implication for a diversiry offields of social research. The work in some ways redefines the whole scope of cultural studies.”

Anthony Giddens

“A book of extraordinary intelligence.”

Irving Louis Horowitz

“Bourdieu’s analysis transcends the usual analysis of conspicuous consumption in two ways: by showing that specific judgments and choices matter less than an esthetic outlook in general and by show­ing, moreover, that the acquisition of an esthetic outlook not only advertises upper-class prestige but helps to keep the lower orders in line. In other words, the esthetic world view serves as an instrument of domination. It serves the interests not merely of staniS but of power. It does this, according to Bourdieu, by emphasizing individ­uality, rivalry, and ‘distinction’ and by devaluing the weU-being of society as a whole.”

Christopher Lasch

Sociology is rarely more akin to social psychoanalysis than when it confronts an object like taste, one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production. This is not only because the judgement of taste is the supreme manifestation of the discernment which, by reconciling reason and sensibility, the pedant who understands without feeling and the mondain who enjoys without understanding, defines the accomplished individual. Nor is it solely because every rule of propriery designates in advance the project of defining this indefinable essence as a clear manifestation of philistinism-whether it be the academic propriety which, from Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wolfflin to Elie Faure and Henri Focillon, and from the most scholastic commentators on the classics to the avant-garde semiologist, insists on a formalist reading of the work of art; or the upperclass propriety which treats taste as one of the surest signs of true nobility and cannot conceive of referring taste to anything other than itself.

Here the sociologist finds himself in the area par excellence of the denial of the social.