Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery of Ministry

by Loïc Wacquant (editor)

Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu’s distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation – starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the “mystery of ministry.”

The fruitfulness of Bourdieu’s approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu’s own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society.
Charting the connections between Bourdieu’s political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Loïc Wacquant is a sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography.

Wacquant is currently a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris. He has been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association.

Reviews

[Mauricio Prado Jaimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super recomendado para conocer cómo se aplica la teoría de campos de Bourdieu a fenómenos políticos, con textos del autor sobre este tema e investigaciones de otros que lo aplican empíricamente.
El aparato teórico de Bourdieu tiene un mundo de posibilidades para aplicarse a muchos espacios y este es imprescindible.