Social space and "classes"

The construction of an adequate theory of social space requires a break with a number of Marxist theorems: first, with a substantialist conception of social groups; then, with the intellectualist illusion that the groups devised by the scientist can be identified in reality; third, with the economic reduction of social space to economic production relations, meaning the neglect of the symbolic struggle over representation in the social world. The text is the extended version of a lecture that Bourdieu delivered to inaugurate the Suhrkamp Lectures in Social and Cultural Sciences in February 1984 in Frankfurt. The second text - Bourdieu's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France from April 1982 - is the paradoxical endeavor, with the authority of the speaker.