Imperialisms: The International Circulation of Ideas and the Struggle for the Universal

by Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Collier (translator)

La notion de champ s’est imposée comme l’un des principaux outils des recherches de Pierre Bourdieu, dans des domaines aussi différents que l’analyse de la culture, du monde intellectuel, du journalisme, de l’édition ou des politiques du logement. Elle a aussi impulsé des travaux beaucoup moins connus, sur les phénomènes d’internationalisation. Les analyses de Pierre Bourdieu sur la circulation internationale des idées et sur les impérialismes de l’universel, qui voient deux puissances politiques comme les États-Unis et la France s’affronter sur le terrain de la légitimité culturelle, ont généré des programmes de recherche collectifs multiples, sur les phénomènes de traduction, sur les échanges scientifiques, sur les politiques économiques menées à l’échelle mondiale, etc. La constitution d’univers globalisés où des problèmes comme le chômage, l’ethnicité ou la pauvreté, sont soumis à des processus d’import-export, contribue à imposer et à naturaliser, sur les scènes politiques nationales, la vision dominante des pays dominants.

220 pages, Hardcover

Published August 25, 2025

About the author

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read. Not as theoretically dense as some of his other works but this is to be expected as it is a seminar.