New Literary History, vol. 36, nº 3

Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. The Mystery of Ministry, edited by Loïc WACQUANT, Polity, 2005, 224 p.

ISBN: 0745634877

Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work was of profound significance for the way we think about democratic politics. This important volume presents and develops Bourdieu's distinctive contribution to the rethinking of democratic politics by explaining his core concept of the political field, his historical model of the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state and his influential analysis of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation.

This volume includes two key texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the nature of the political field and political representation, and a highly influential text by Bourdieu and Wacquant on the dangers of American cultural imperialism in the intellectual world. The fruitfulness of Bourdieu's approach to politics is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, parties, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu's own political engagements and his treatment of the place of reason and recognition in political life.