Reading Order
La DistinctionLa Distinction Reading Order
La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1979) by Pierre Bourdieu is the most important work of French sociology since Durkheim — a comprehensive empirical and theoretical analysis of the relationship between social class and cultural taste in France, based on surveys conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourdieu argues that what we experience as personal aesthetic preference — the taste for classical music or for jazz, for Renoir or for abstract art, for sophisticated cooking or for hearty food — is not individual or natural but is socially produced and reproduces social distinctions. The key concepts are cultural capital (the knowledge, dispositions, and credentials that confer social advantage), habitus (the system of durable dispositions that embodies the social position), and field (the semi-autonomous social space in which agents compete). Distinction won the Médaille d'or du CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and was named by the International Sociological Association as one of the ten most important sociology books of the twentieth century. Bourdieu held the Chair in Sociology at the Collège de France from 1982 until his death in 2002.
Where to start
Read La Distinction after Les Règles de l'art (1992) or at least a short introduction to Bourdieu's key concepts — 'field,' 'habitus,' and 'capital' need to be understood before the empirical analysis of Distinction makes full sense. Bourdieu's Questions de sociologie (1980) is the most accessible entry point; Homo Academicus (1984) is the most entertaining application of the method.
Complete La Distinction Book List
- 1Buy
La Distinction
Pierre Bourdieu·1979·The masterpiece — read after an introduction to habitus and capital; the empirical analysis of French class taste; the Médaille d'or du CNRS; the most important French sociology book since Durkheim - 2Buy
Questions de sociologie
Pierre Bourdieu·1980·The most accessible entry — interviews and short pieces explaining the key concepts; the best introduction to Bourdieu before attempting La Distinction - 3Buy
Homo Academicus
Pierre Bourdieu·1984·The most entertaining Bourdieu — the analysis of the French academic field applied to the very milieu producing it; self-reflexive sociology at its most acute - 4Buy
Les Règles de l'art
Pierre Bourdieu·1992·The Rules of Art — the analysis of the literary field (Flaubert, Zola, the Impressionists); Bourdieu's most sustained application of field theory to cultural production - 5Buy
La Misère du monde
Pierre Bourdieu·1993·The Weight of the World — the collective study of social suffering in contemporary France; the most politically direct Bourdieu; read after the theoretical works
La Distinction — Frequently Asked Questions
What is cultural capital?
Cultural capital is one of Bourdieu's three forms of capital (alongside economic capital and social capital) — the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and credentials that confer social advantage. Bourdieu distinguishes three states of cultural capital: the embodied state (the dispositions, tastes, and knowledge that have been internalized through education and family experience and have become part of the body — the habitus); the objectified state (books, paintings, instruments); and the institutionalized state (educational credentials — degrees, diplomas — which convert cultural capital into an officially recognized and guaranteed form). Cultural capital is the key mechanism through which social class reproduces itself through the educational system while appearing to reward individual merit.
What is the habitus?
The habitus is Bourdieu's central theoretical concept — a system of durable, transposable dispositions, acquired through early experience (especially class-specific family and educational experience), which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends. The habitus is the embodied class position — it generates the practical sense ('le sens pratique') that makes a person feel comfortable in some social situations and uncomfortable in others, that makes certain aesthetic choices feel natural and others feel forced or pretentious. The habitus is not fully conscious (it is embodied, not conceptual) and is not deterministic (it generates possible practices within a range, not a single pre-determined practice).
How does Bourdieu explain the taste for 'legitimate culture'?
Bourdieu's central argument in La Distinction is that the taste for what counts as 'legitimate culture' (classical music, avant-garde literature, abstract art) is not a natural aesthetic sensibility but is produced by the educational system and by the family conditions that give access to that education. The person who finds a Kandinsky painting beautiful and a Renoir portrait banal is not expressing a superior innate aesthetic sense — they are expressing the embodied class position that produced, through years of schooling and family cultural experience, the dispositions that make abstract art feel natural and representational art feel vulgar. The 'pure' aesthetic judgment that Kant described — disinterested, universal, free of social determination — is, for Bourdieu, the ideology of the dominant class that has succeeded in naturalizing its own culturally arbitrary preferences.
What is the sociological field?
A field (champ) is, for Bourdieu, a semi-autonomous social space organized around a specific form of capital and a specific set of stakes — the literary field, the artistic field, the academic field, the political field, the economic field. Each field has its own rules, its own forms of legitimate authority, and its own history of struggles over the definition of what counts as legitimate practice within the field. The literary field, for example, is organized around the opposition between 'art for art's sake' and 'art for money' — the writer who refuses commercial success is accumulating symbolic capital that is converted into legitimate literary authority; the popular novelist who maximizes commercial success is accumulating economic capital but losing symbolic authority. The concept of field allows Bourdieu to analyze cultural production without reducing it either to individual genius or to economic determinism.
What is the relationship between Bourdieu and Foucault?
Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault were the two dominant figures of French social science in the 1970s and 1980s, and their relationship was one of mutual respect, mutual critique, and intellectual competition. Both analyzed how power operates through cultural and institutional practices rather than through direct political authority; both rejected the humanist subject as the starting point of social analysis; and both were concerned with the reproduction of social inequality through non-economic mechanisms. But their approaches differ fundamentally: Foucault's genealogy analyzes discourse and disciplinary practices without a theory of agents and their interests; Bourdieu's field theory centers on the strategies of agents competing for different forms of capital within a structured social space. Foucault's power/knowledge vs. Bourdieu's capital/field is the fundamental theoretical choice in post-structural social analysis.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.