Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action

By Pierre Bourdieu

Book Overview

Do social classes really exist? Is disinterested action really possible? What do the family, the church, and the intellectual world have in common? Can morality be founded on hypocrisy? What is the "subject" of action? In this new volume, one of France's foremost social thinkers of our time responds to these major questions and to others, thus tracing the outlines of a work that could be called "Pierre Bourdieu by himself."

In these texts, the author tries to go to the essential, that is, the most elementary and fundamental, questions. He thereby explains the philosophical principles that have led to his social science research and the idea of the human that guides his choices there. With the lucidity allowed by retrospect, Bourdieu brings out the fundamental theories of his greatest books, notably Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), and, with an eye to the future, presents the first results of his most recent work on the state, the anthropological moorings of the economy, and male domination.

Bourdieu's theory is both a philosophy of science dedicated to revealing the objective relations that shape and underpin social life, and a philosophy of action that takes account of agents' dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of key concepts-habitus, field, capital-and it is defined by the two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus.

All in all, this book should be an indispensable introduction to Bourdieu's work, not only to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, but throughout the social sciences and humanities generally.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804733635
• ISBN13: 9780804733632
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An excellent invitation, but not sufficient in itself

This book, a collection of various articles written by Bourdieu, serves as an excellent invitation to Bourdieu's oeuvre. It provides some introduction to key concepts, and introduces the reader, through important selections, to the logic and presentation of Bourdieu's thought. The book covers various niches of Bourdieu's study, from symbolic violence to ethics to aesthetics to Kabyle gift-giving, and so on. While it is not...

Excellent Introduction to a Prolific Writer

A difficulty with approaching such a prolific author as Bourdieu is determining where one should begin reading. This short, 150-page book composed of mostly lectures and concise essays serves as an excellent beginning to not only gaining a grasp of the key ideas put forth by Bourdieu..., but also, insofar as Bourdieu throughout the work is reviewing a lifetime of sociological writing, it serves as an excellent topical mapping...

Best Introduction to Bourdieusian Thought Available

It's not very often that an author is able to take a highly complex set of work(s) and summarize them into an easily read and understood piece. While the overviews offered by scholars of Bourdieu, such as Swartz's _Culture and Power_ or Bourdieu and Wacquant's _Invitation to Reflexive Sociology_ prove a broad overview of Bourdieu's work, they generally require that the reader be well versed in the specifics of Bourdieusian...