ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu’s work is representative of a return to formal theory and theoretical stringency in French sociology after a generation dominated by a transatlantic positivistic empiricism. Readers of Bourdieu on the side of the Channel may find much to stimulate them. Increasingly there are signs of a new concern with epistemology arising from a questioning of traditional conceptions of sociology and its practice. Society as a system of illusions is the theme of Bourdieu’s work. All is ‘pre-constructed’. This is why positivist sociology with its blind acceptance of what Nietzsche calls ‘the dogma of the immaculate perception’, seeing itself as ‘free from preventions and presuppositions’, is likely to fall into all the traps set by pre-constructed objects. To comprehend more fully what Bourdieu means by a structured and structuring structure, one should turn to his theory of culture. By culture, Bourdieu means literature, science, religion, art, language and all symbolic systems falling within the widest definition of the term.
