Distinction

No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction" brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the cour...

No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction" brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life, we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. This fascinating work argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.

布尔迪厄（1930-2002），当代法国著名思想家、社会学家。主要著作有《实践理论纲要》《国家精英：名牌大学与群体精神》《再生产》《艺术的法则》《区分：判断力的社会批判》。在这些著作中，布尔迪厄借助其“习性”、“资本”、“场”等概念，对资本主义社会进行了深刻的批判。

译者

刘晖，1970年生，法国文学博士，中国社会科学院外国文学研究所副研究员。译著有《色情史》《艺术的法则》《男性统治》《帕斯卡尔式的沉思》《自我分析纲要》等。