Pierre Bourdieu

As Richard Jenkins points out, Pierre Bourdieu's sociological writings are complex enough to render their insights almost inaccessible. Yet Jenkins compels readers to look beyond Bourdieu's unnecessarily opaque language games, to recognize his significant contributions to sociology and social anthropology. Personifying the continued value and rigor of the French intellectual tradition within the social sciences, Bourdieu occupies a political and theoretical space constructed out of the divergent currents of Marx, Weber and Durkheim; structuralism and interactionism; pessimistic determination, but also out of a celebratory belief in the creative potential of human practice.