ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), a philosopher turned sociologist bred by the very French tradition of Grandes Écoles, among the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and many other influential thinkers of the twentieth century, was a leading voice of social justice and path-breaking scientific analyses. In his research, his ambition was to devise a general theory which would demolish disciplinary borders across the social sciences and would be applicable to virtually all societies. In a scientific world marked by isolationism, with scholars locked in higher and higher ivory towers of tinier and tinier subject matters, Bourdieu’s work is, to our knowledge, the most recent attempt in the social sciences at offering a general, grand perspective on society, on the ways people think and behave. The breadth and scope of his knowledge enabled him to blend philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, history and economics into an integrated, consistent theory of human behaviour and social reality. For him, the study of the economy was not a secondary theme. And it was all the less so as he endorsed and generalised many key economic notions such as capital, interest and strategy, by changing their meaning, which raised some confusion and misunderstanding – the common lot of pioneering thinkers. The basic objective of this volume is to implement a cross-fertilisation between Bourdieu’s theories and that of economics so as to enrich our scientific imagination and our ability to think about globalisation and the erratic changes of modern society.
