Classification Struggles

This is the first of five volumes that will be based on lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Coll¿ 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, giving it his own distinctive twist. In doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well-known, such as field, capital and habitus, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practiced today.

In this first volume, Bourdieu focuses on the fundamental social processes of naming and classifying the world, the ways that social actors use words to construct social objects and the struggles that arise from this. The sociologist encounters a world that is already named, already classified, where objects and social realities are marked by signs that have already been assigned to them. In order to avoid the naivet¿nd confusion that stem from taking for granted a wo