Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

I must say, this is a nice translation. The translator has skillfully rendered Bourdieu's difficult text in English, and for that he should be applauded. Nicely done!

This is a fantastic explication of how social class prearranges our tastes and interests. I disagree with the reader who thinks that it is not applicable to American society--to the contrary. It is true that American culture is not so obviously stratified in the exact same ways as French culture (of the 1960s, I would add, when Bourdieu collected his data). Also, in American culture there is less of a tendency to exploit... Read Full Review

I come back to this book time and again in my own work and see it as one of the most indispensible books today on issues of aesthetics, class distinctions, group identity, and covert social inequality. Bourdieu takes on the Kantian aesthetics of the "subjective universal," showing that the value judgments about things reflect material and social conditions and in fact index social and class differences. The way we classify... Read Full Review

Pierre Bourdieu in the philosophe (probably more than the sociologue) of determinism. According to him all our acts are led by social pressures. And this is why this book is so interesting. Even if he sometimes go too far, he shows in a brilliant way, that what we consider today natural is definitely cultural. Our tastes in food drink, music, cinema... do not depend on us but on our social background. Perfect conterpoint... Read Full Review

While the text is academic and sometimes rather heavy going, Pierre Bourdieu has written a clear-eyed, erudite exposition on class and taste: how taste is judged by various classes and how heavily choices based on "taste" can weigh in a sociological sense