Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht

by Pierre Bourdieu

Genres: Sociology, Cultural

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bourdieu ist der Großmeister hinter der modernen Soziologie. Seine Kategorien "kulturelles Kapital", "Habitus" usw. ermöglichen eine differenziertere Erfassung der Mechanismen sozialer Ungleichheit und vor allem ihrer sozio- kulturellen Reproduktion. Darum geht es auch in den Mechanismen der Macht. Trotzdem ist das Thema nicht ganz auf den Punkt gebracht. Was fehlt ist der systemische Aspekt, die genaue Erfassung des Zusammenhangs/ der Verquickung von (privat- kapitalistischer) Wirtschaftsweise und (politischer) Macht. Nein, der Aspekt fehlt natürlich nicht, aber es fehlt ihm an Zuspitzung, an letzter Präzision. Trotzdem lesenwert.