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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 87

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

analysis beyond Marx and Weber’ (Eder, 1993, p. 63). Certainly,
if critical theory is defined in terms of its aspiration to change
the world, then Bourdieu was as critical a theorist as any. Dur-
ing the late 1990s, he emerged as by far the most prominent
academic intellectual to join in active solidarity with the new ‘anti-
globalisation’ movements. His La Misère du monde, first published
in hardback in 1993, and in paperback in 1998, became a bestseller
in France and a major source of political inspiration to the
movement, both in the original and in its English translation as
The Weight of the World. He was directly involved in militant ‘anti-
globalisation’ activism, speaking at mass meetings of striking
railway workers in 1995 and unemployed workers in 1998
(Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 24n, 88n); he launched the 1996 petition for
an ‘Estates General of the Social Movement’ and its May Day 2000
successor, the appeal for a pan-European Estates General; he co-
founded the radical ‘Raisons d’agir’ group and its associated
publishing house; he publicly called ‘for a left Left’ (Bourdieu,
1998a); and he was a regular contributor to the radical French
monthly, Le Monde diplomatique. We might add that, like Marx,
Bourdieu attached a distinctive subtitle to what is still his best-
known work: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Bourdieu, 1984).
Bourdieu’s reputation as a sociological thinker revolves
around the ‘theory of practice’, in which he attempted to theorise
human sociality as the outcome of the strategic action of indi-
viduals operating within a constraining, but not determining,
context of values. Famously, the term Bourdieu coined to
describe this was ‘the habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977), by which he
meant ‘an acquired system of generative schemes objectively
adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted’
(p. 95). It is simultaneously structured and structuring, materi-
ally produced and very often generation-specific (pp. 72, 78).
Elsewhere, he describes it as ‘a kind of transforming machine that
leads us to “reproduce” the social conditions of our own produc-
tion, but in a relatively unpredictable way’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 87).
Like Marx and Weber, Bourdieu considers contemporary
capitalist societies to be class societies. But for Bourdieu, their
dominant and dominated classes are distinguishable from each

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