It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology. The topic of Bourdieu’s book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment.

Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Drawing on extensive empirical research and developing many new concepts that have had a lasting impact on the social sciences, it puts forward a groundbreaking theory about the relationship between taste and class. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. Distinction (1979) is widely considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century sociology. France’s leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. It will provide the historian of the future with priceless materials and it will bring an essential contribution to sociological theory.No judgment of taste is innocent.

It does this, according to Bourdieu, by emphasizing individuality, rivalry, and ‘distinction’ and by devaluing the well-being of society as a whole. It serves the interests not merely of status but of power. In other words, the esthetic world view serves as an instrument of domination. “Bourdieu’s analysis transcends the usual analysis of conspicuous consumption in two ways: by showing that specific judgments and chokes matter less than an esthetic outlook in general and by showing, moreover, that the acquisition of an esthetic outlook not only advertises upper-class prestige but helps to keep the lower orders in line. The work in some ways redefines the whole scope of cultural studies. “One of the more distinguished contributions to social theory and research in recent years… There is in this book an account of culture, and a methodology of its study, rich in implication for a diversity of fields of social research.

Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu