Forme di capitale e campi di lotte. Sociologia generale vol. 3

by Pierre Bourdieu, Agostino Petrillo (Editor)

Il terzo volume tratto dalle lezioni di Sociologia generale tenute da Pierre Bourdieu al Collège de France si concentra sul concetto di “capitale”, con particolare attenzione al nesso con il concetto di campo. Alternando una parte “teorica” e una “applicativa”, il libro presenta i vari stati del capitale culturale, attraverso esempi provenienti dalle ricerche in corso, e si concentra sulle forme della sua oggettivazione e codificazione all’interno del mondo sociale. Particolare attenzione è riservata anche al campo letterario, con l’analisi della hit-parade di letterati e intellettuali promossa dalla rivista “Lire”, tema che Bourdieu riprenderà successivamente e che incrocia quello dei posizionamenti e del ruolo dello Stato nel nominare gli esperti, nonché quello del campo giornalistico.

364 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).