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In this critical introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, Jeremy Lane sets out to situate "Bourdieu's work in the two interrelated contexts of the French intellectual field out of which it emerged and the shift to late capitalism which it has analysed" (7). As the non-Bourdieusian expressionlate capitalism may perhaps already suggest, Lane's intent is to refute the all-too frequent—and granted, unfair—criticism that Bourdieu's work is "intrinsically resistant to social change"(5). While Bourdieu's political activism and visibility in the media from the early 1990s on clearly attest to the importance he granted issues of social change, Lane argues that the central place they occupy in the entirety of his writings has largely gone unnoticed. Against the critical tendency to reduce all thought produced during "France's transition to late capitalism" (6) to a single postmodern denominator, Lane presents Bourdieu as a resolutely modern thinker. He views Bourdieu's writing —void, as it is, of the postmodern proclamations concerning the end of reason, history and science—as a site of production of rational, scientific tools for the analysis of particular historical fields.
Lane's book, however, does not really represent an attempt on his part to "take up his [Bourdieu's] ideas and concepts and attempt toapply them in new areas of enquiry" (194, my emphasis). Rather, it seeks to "provide a critical and objective assessment of [Bourdieu's] theoretical apparatus" (ibid.) by tracing its development in the national social-intellectual context in which it emerged, and by situating Bourdieu, viewed here primarily as a theoretician of social change, among other prominent French thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. Centered on those case studies most likely to shed light on Bourdieu's views concerning social change, this intellectual biography follows a "broadly chronological and thematic approach, tracing the development of Bourdieu's thought from his earliest to his most recent work" (7).
Chapter 1, "Peasants into Revolutionaries?," draws from Bourdieu's lesser-known writings on Algeria, establishing his positions on colonization andrevolution at the time of the war of independence and comparing them with those of other political thinkers of the period, including Althusser, Fanon and Sartre. Chapter 2, "Frenchmen into Consumers?," focuses on research Bourdieu published in the 1960s, including "Celibacy and the Peasant Condition," Photography, and The Love of Art.Lane identifies the issue of...