the youth of Pierre Bourdieu recounted in a book

Interview A meticulous work recounts the youth of the author of “La Distinction”, who came from a very modest background in Béarn. How was Bourdieu able to join Normale Sup and end up a professor at the Collège de France? No miracle…

For his first attempt, the young sociologist Victor Collard tackled a mountain, nothing less: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), one of the last icons of French human sciences, sociologist and committed intellectual, professor at the Collège de France, whose very left-wing positions have aroused as much veneration as detestation. After devoting his thesis to Bourdieu (at EHESS, under the direction of Frédéric Lordon), Victor Collard dedicates a « sociobiographie »an impressive work entitled “Pierre Bourdieu, genesis of a sociologist” (CNRS Editions).

Its title says it perfectly: it retraces the years of training of this son of an employee of the Post Office of Béarn who nothing predestined to become neither khâgneux, nor normalien, nor philosopher, nor sociologist. How could this improbable defector journey have been possible? This is precisely what Collard deciphers, without ever falling into “bourdieulatry”. He answers our questions.

Pierre Bourdieu was the great thinker of social determinisms…