advert

My friend Jeremy, frequent commenter and sometime guest poster on this very blog, is shortly to release to the world his new book, Bourdieu's Politics. (Let us pass over in silence the typo in the subtitle on Routledge's website...) Here's the blurb:

In the last decade of his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu became involved in a series of high-profile political interventions, defending the cause of striking students and workers, speaking out in the name of illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the unemployed, challenging the incursion of the market into the field of artistic and intellectual production.

The first sustained analysis of Bourdieu's politics, this study will seek to assess the validity of his claims as to the distinctiveness and superiority of his own field theory as a tool of political analysis.

He has kindly sent me the proofs, and it looks good.

Jezzer has already written the single best book on Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (available in North America via The University of Michigan Press).

He has for some time been promising that he will progress from his love/hate relationship with the man Pierre, and move on to thinking and writing about such things as French intellectuals' passion for jazz. (Cf. the Derrida movie, which we watched last night.) But in the meantime...

Order Bourdieu's Politics now. (For a mere £65!)