This is the fifth and final volume based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Coll- 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 volume, Bourdieu develops his view of the social world as the site of a struggle for the legitimate vision of the world, a struggle in which the agents confronting one another are unequally armed. The specific weapon used in these struggles is what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which is economic, cultural or social capital when perceived through suitable categories of perception. All forms of power seek to impose their own categories of perception in a way that is both recognized and misrecognized. This is how forms of power establish themselves as legitimate, because legitimacy is a
