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, 脡mile 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).
These lectures delivered over 3 years at the College de France expose the state - and our abiding belief in it - as a 400-year old political fiction brought to life by its many agents through their collective acts done in the name of the state. If this sounds tautological, it is - the state exists because we act as if it does. Its power is dispersed through rituals and routines that may seem innocuous or inevitable - the calendar, geography, spelling, licenses, disciplines taught in school as discrete knowledges, housing practices, taxes - but that make its subjects serve it and those who have access to its symbolic capital. To read the state at this level (where it is brought into being in both long range and intimate day to day ways) requires Weber, Marx and Durkheim to bear.
Sempre que me debru莽o sobre Bourdieu chego 脿 mesma conclus茫o: se foi cedo demais. E essa s茅rie de aulas 茅 prova definitiva de qu茫o inteligente e complexo (sem tender ao complicado) o pensamento (sempre em movimento, diga-se de passagem) de Pierre Bourdieu sempre foi. Sobre o Estado 茅 mais do que uma cole莽茫o de palestras, 茅 uma chance de espiar o que ainda poderia ser caso o soci贸logo ainda estivesse vivo.
Bourdieu is a brilliant thinker, but a mediocre rhetorician. Most annoying are his slanderous remarks about Marxism. He caricatures the ideas of Marx to make his own seem more original. Classic example: he claims that the ideas of lawyers are products of their material struggle about power and influence, but you should not use the base/superstructure model to analyze this! (For the uninitiated: what Bourdieu describes here is an excellent illustration of the base/superstructure model, where the superstructure (culture, ideas, institutions) are constructed over a material base.)
While criticizing the conventional approaches to state including Weberian, institutional and particularly Marxist approaches; Bourdieu mainly addresses the ways of analysing the state and suggests an ethno- methodological approach as a way to analyse this 鈥渦nthinkable object鈥�. At least you have to ask anthropological, ethno methodological questions together with the global questions to have adequate questions on the state (p.171). State is primarily a legitimator.