ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu was a dominant figure in French social sciences in the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, and he became influential internationally, especially in cultural sociology and studies of social inequality. An important goal for him was to transcend the oppositions in classical social theory between structuralism and phenomenology, which is a goal for Habermas and Giddens as well. Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 as the son of a village postman and his wife in the village of Denguin in Southern France. Bourdieu draws, in particular, on Marx and Weber. According to Rogers Brubaker, Weber is the most important classic in Bourdieu’s sociology. The concept of cultural capital has to do with a complex form of symbolic capital that Bourdieu introduced. While cultural sociologists long had acknowledged that cultural consumption functioned as a marker of social status, Bourdieu’s main contribution was that he saw cultural capital as a matter of disposition, and just an acquisition.
