ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu was probably the most eminent sociologist, of the final quarter of the twentieth century, in the world. He was also probably the most controversial. He had long aroused fierce passions within French sociological circles. There he had become increasingly well-known from the 1960s, and his eminent position in the French sociological field was marked by his election to the most prestigious of professorships in sociology at the Collège de France in 1981.1 The personalized tensions and oppositions that typically fracture the intellectual field in France, which result in clan-like solidarities, stoke the fires of hostility and controversy. No account of his impact in France would be adequate without some understanding of the personalized bases of intellectual alignments and allegiances, with Alain Touraine and Raymond Boudon providing Bourdieu’s main competitors and antagonists (Robbins, 2000; Grenfell, 2004b; Fuller, 2006). As a prominent figure in the French intellectual field, he personally inspired mixed emotional reactions, with some very negative judgements expressed by his adversaries, as for example captured in a recent biography by Marie-Anne Lescourret (2008), which accuses him of being arrogant and dismissive. His undoubted self-confidence irritated fellow sociologists unsympathetic to his work. Bernard Lahire (1999: 11), a sociologist who engaged closely and critically with Bourdieu’s work, took the view that Bourdieu ‘like many other researchers in social sciences refuses to recognize his adversaries and remains deaf to all refutation’. Natalie Heinich (2002: 45), a former student of Bourdieu’s, described the situation as one where ‘the real enemies are not those with whom one debates but those with whom we no longer speak’. As Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (1988 [1984]) makes clear, the French academic world is a competitive one where strategic manoeuvring for reputation and rewards are the norm, with the ensuing rivalry within the field sometimes becoming bitter and acrimonious.
