BOURDIEU (Pierre).
Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l'action.
Inscribed by the author to Maurice Nadeau (1911-2013) ‘Pour Maurice Nadeau, avec mon admiration et mon amite PB’ in black ink to the half title. Nadeau was a literary critic and editor, collaborating early in life with Breton and later writing the major reference work History of Surrealism. His work helped bring to prominence, among others, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller.
An important methodological work by the distinguished French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, analogous in a sense to Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge as a work of retrospective methodology for Bourdieu’s existing studies that also lay the groundwork for his social scientific research going forward. Bourdieu had across a decades-long career synthesised the traditional fields of anthropology and sociology into a form of sociological investigation capable of breaking with the antinomy of the subjective/objective, thereby uniting structuralist and social phenomenologist thought into a philosophy of action. In this book, such wide-ranging work is condensed into a consideration of key concepts such as ‘field’, ‘capital’, and ‘habitus’. The latter term circumscribes the embodied, precognitive disposition individuals internalise from their social environment, permitting access to an analysis of the reproduction of social structures operating through an interpenetration of the objective and the subjective. A pivotal work from one of France’s most important post-War public intellectuals.
