Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was one of the most influential sociologists of the late twentieth century, offering a powerful vocabulary for understanding how power and inequality persist beneath the surface of everyday life. His work resists simple labels: it combines structural analysis with attention to lived experience, empirical research with theoretical innovation, and political commitment with scholarly rigor. At its core, Bourdieu’s thought seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: how do social structures shape individual actions, and how do those actions, in turn, reproduce the very structures that constrain them?
Three key concepts form the backbone of his approach. Habitus refers to the deeply ingrained dispositions, tastes, and ways of acting that individuals acquire through their upbringing and social environment. These are not fixed rules but flexible patterns that guide perception and behavior. Field designates the semi-autonomous arenas—such as art, education, politics, or science—where actors struggle for power and recognition according to specific rules of the game. Capital broadens the economic sense of the term to include cultural (knowledge, education, taste), social (networks and relationships), and symbolic (prestige and legitimacy) resources. The distribution and conversion of these forms of capital explain why some actors dominate fields while others remain marginal.
Bourdieu’s originality lies in showing how habitus, field, and capital interact. Our tastes in music or art, our educational choices, even our bodily postures, all reflect a history of accumulated social advantages or disadvantages. What appears as personal preference or natural talent is often the outcome of structured inequalities. He called the subtle ways in which domination is normalized symbolic violence: a form of power that hides itself by seeming natural and legitimate.
At the same time, Bourdieu was not fatalistic. By developing a reflexive sociology—one that critically examines the researcher’s own position—he opened space for awareness and change. His analyses of education, culture, and politics continue to inspire scholars and activists who want to uncover hidden mechanisms of inequality and imagine fairer social arrangements. Bourdieu invites us to see that the social world is not fate but history—made, reproduced, and therefore transformable.
