This is the first of five volumes that will be based on lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France in the early 1980s under the title ‘General Sociology’. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline, giving it his own distinctive twist. In doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts for which he has become so well-known, such as field, capital and habitus, concepts that continue to shape the way that sociology is practiced today. In this first volume, Bourdieu focuses on the fundamental social processes of naming and classifying the world, the ways that social actors use words to construct social objects and the struggles that arise from this. The sociologist encounters a world that is already named, already classified, where objects and social realities are marked by signs that have already been assigned to them. In order to avoid the naiveté and confusion that stem from taking for granted a world that has been socially constituted, sociologists must examine the part played by words in the construction of social things – or, to put it differently, the contribution that classification struggles, a dimension of all class struggles, play in the constitution of classes, including classes of age, sex, race and social class. An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu’s most important concepts and ideas, this volume will be of great interest to the many students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu’s work across the social sciences and humanities, and to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the 20th century.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements ix Lecture of 28 April 1982 1 Teaching research The logic of research and the logic of exposition What is classification? Classifying the classifying subject Constructed divisions and real divisions The insult Lecture of 5 May 1982 15 The act of institution The insult as magical behaviour Coding individuals Dividing reality The example of socio-occupational categories Lecture of 12 May 1982 30 Objective classification and objectivity Objective indicators and strategies of self-representation Parenthesis on monumental history The ruses of sociological reason An objective definition of objective indicators? The objectivist moment The geometrical point of convergence of all perspectives The problem of sampling Lecture of 19 May 1982 48 The legitimate definition of the principle of definition Operations of research as acts of constitution Classification as an object of conflict Objectifying objectivism Good classification and scholastic bias Theoretical classification and practical classification Lecture of 26 May 1982 64 Moving beyond the alternatives Reality and representations of reality The autonomy of the social and the problem of self-awareness The law, a special case of theory effect Words as common sense Lecture of 2 June 1982 80 The act of consecration The symbolic struggle over classification Symbolic capital The manipulation of boundaries between groups Defending one's capital Lecture of 9 June 1982 101 The accumulation of symbolic capital Names and titles as forms of objectification Making public The institutionalization of symbolic capital The two bodies Consensual imaginanes Lecture of 16 June 1982 118 Acting 'in the name of…' On delegation The state and perspectivism The problem of the truth of the social world Validation by consensus or objective evidence Situating the Course on General Sociology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu Patrick Champagne Julien Duval 134 Appendix Summary of lectures, published in the Annuaire du Collège de France 155 Notes 158 Index 176