ABSTRACT
It is important to place Bourdieu in his life and times since they spanned such an important period in French and European history, and their intellectual developments. He was born in 1930 and was professionally active for the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter addresses the impact of his childhood experiences together with the personal intellectual epiphany that he had as a result of experiences in Algeria during the war of independence and his home background in the Béarn. It will set Bourdieu alongside the socio-political events of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as reference his opposition to neoliberal economics from the 1980s. The intent here is to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and socio-political, and the way this shaped his ideas. It thus covers key political events and the way the ‘scientific Bourdieu’ developed somewhat in relation to the ‘empirical Bourdieu’. The chapter also introduces the intellectual traditions that shaped Bourdieu and how he orientated himself with respect to them.
