Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was born in Gascony on 1 August 1930 and spent his career at France's most elite institutions - the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the Collège de France. Drawing on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Lévi-Strauss while rejecting Western philosophy's idealist drift, he built a sociology that insisted on the body, on practice, on the subtle mechanics of power reproduction. He gave the field its sharpest tools: habitus, cultural capital, symbolic violence - concepts that explained how advantage perpetuates itself without anyone admitting it does. His 1979 book Distinction, named the sixth most important sociological work of the century, combined survey data and interviews to argue that aesthetic judgment is social positioning dressed up as personal taste. Prolific to the end - hundreds of articles, three dozen books - Bourdieu spent four decades dismantling the myth that formal education delivers mobility, showing instead how it consecrates the privileged. He died in Paris on 23 January 2002.