Principles of Vision

This is the fourth of five volumes based on the 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, and in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts which have come to define his distinctive intellectual approach.

Having elaborated the concepts of habitus and field in previous volumes, Bourdieu now undertakes an analysis of the relations between them, showing that social fields are objects of perception and knowledge for the agents engaged in them. The field of forces is the source of different visions of the social world, visions that are linked to agents¿ positions via the specific interests that motivate them and the habitus that is, at least partly, the product of the determining factors associated with their position. This relation between the world perceived and our cognitive structures explains wh