Pierre Bourdieu

About the author

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual whose work reshaped how scholars understand power, class, and culture. Associated primarily with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France, he introduced concepts — habitus, cultural capital, symbolic violence, and the field — that became foundational across sociology, anthropology, education, and cultural studies. Building critically on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Lévi-Strauss, he examined the subtle, often embodied mechanisms by which social order and inequality reproduce themselves across generations.

His best-known work is Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement.