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 which 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 a struggle in which the agents
confronting one another are unequally armed. 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 recognized and misrecognized. This is how
forms of power establish themselves as legitimate because legitimacy is a force of recognition
based on misrecognition that is recognized insofar as it prevents us from recognizing the
arbitrariness at the source of its efficacy. By rejecting the opposition between structuralist
objectification and subjectivist constructivism sociology on Bourdieu's account can seek to
grasp both the objective structure of social fields and the properly political strategies that
agents produce in order to establish and impose their viewpoint. And it can do this without
forgetting that the whole world of social construction whereby agents participate in producing
social realities and inscribing them into the lasting objectivity of structures is oriented by
the perception they have of the social world which depends on their position in these
structures and their dispositions themselves fashioned by the structures. An ideal
introduction to some of Bourdieu's most important ideas the five volumes of this series will
be of great value to students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu's work across the social
sciences and humanities and they will be of interest to general readers who want to know more
about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the 20th
century.
