Die feinen Unterschiede

Pierre Bourdieu, born on August 1, 1930, in Denguin (Pyrénées Atlantiques), attended the Lycée de Pau and transferred in 1948 to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, he began an extraordinary academic career. From 1958 to 1960, he served as an assistant at the Faculté des lettres in Algiers before moving to Paris and Lille. In 1964, he became a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. That same year, he started publishing the series "Le sens commun" with Éditions de Minuit and received a teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure. He subsequently held visiting professorships and research positions at Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research. Since 1975, he has been the editor of the research series "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales." In 1982, he was appointed to the Collège de France. In 1993, he received the highest academic honor in France, the Médaille d'or from the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. In 1997, he was awarded the Ernst Bloch Prize by the city of Ludwigshafen.

In his early ethnological works, Bourdieu studied the society of the Kabyles in Algeria. The experiences from his empirical ethnological research formed the basis for his 1972 work "Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique" (English: Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1979). In his most famous book "La distinction" (1979, English: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984), Bourdieu analyzes how habits, leisure activities, and ideals of beauty are used to express and reproduce class consciousness. Through numerous examples, Bourdieu illustrates how groups define themselves in subtle ways through fine distinctions.