Politics and Sociology: General Sociology, Volume 5

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Bourdieu's fifth and final volume of "General Sociology" defines and defends sociology as an intellectual discipline, introducing and clarifying key concepts such as symbolic capital, the social world as a struggle for the legitimate vision of the world, and the rejection of the opposition between structuralist objectification and subjectivist constructivism. This volume is an ideal introduction to Bourdieu's most important ideas and will be of value to students and scholars of the social sciences and humanities, as well as general readers interested in his work.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 27 October 2023
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd

This is the fifth and final volume based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France in the early 1980s under the title 'General Sociology'. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline, and in doing so, he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts that have come to define his distinctive intellectual approach.

In this volume, Bourdieu develops his view of the social world as the site of a struggle for the legitimate vision of the world. The specific weapon used in these struggles is what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which is economic, cultural, or social capital when perceived through suitable categories of perception. All forms of power seek to impose their own categories of perception in a way that is both recognised and misrecognised. This is how forms of power establish themselves as legitimate, because legitimacy is a force of recognition based on misrecognition, that is, recognised in a way that prevents us from recognising its arbitrariness.

By rejecting the opposition between structuralist objectification and subjectivist constructivism, sociology can seek to grasp both the objective structure of social fields and the properly political strategies that agents use in order to establish and impose their viewpoint. And it can do so without forgetting that the whole world of social construction is oriented by the perception agents have of the social world, which depends on their position in the structures of social fields and their dispositions, themselves fashioned by these structures.

An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieus most important ideas, the five volumes of this series will be of great value to students and scholars who study and use Bourdieus work across the soci.

Weight: 590g
Dimension: 162 x 237 x 31 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781509526727