ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu, Professor of Sociology at the College de France, was born in 1930 in the province of Bearn in the south of France, the son of a civil servant. Bourdieu rose to prominence-en the French intellectual scene in the late 1960s when the book Les Heretiers, coauthored with his colleague Claude Passeron, became a source book for the student revolt of 1968, evidence of poor education and economic prospects and, most importantly, of the complicity of the French educational establishment in the promotion of a class-ridden society. While Bourdieu’s sociology constantly clarifies the relationship between the individual and society, Class power is the exclusive control of cultural capital, the subtle retention of cultural privilege to restrict access to economic and political privilege. The working classes are trapped in their habitus through cultural impoverishment and cultural difference. The criticisms mentioned by no means negate his theories, rather they are the basis for constructive development.
