Classification Struggles

General Sociology, Volume 1 (1981-1982)

This is the first of five volumes based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collge de France in the early 1980s under the title “General Sociology”. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline, and in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts which have come to define his distinctive intellectual approach.

In this first volume, Bourdieu focuses on the fundamental social processes of naming and classifying the world, the ways that social agents use words to construct social objects and the struggles that arise from this. The sociologist encounters a world that is already named, already classified, where objects and social realities are marked by signs that have already been assigned to them. In order to avoid the naivety and confusion that stem from taking for granted a world that has been socially constituted,