SOURCE: Pollitt, Katha. “Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-2002.” Nation (18 February 2002): 10.

In the following essay, Pollitt provides an assessment of Bourdieu's professional career, calling his work “the most brilliant and fruitful renovation and application of Marxian concepts in our era.”

The death on January 23 of the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came as the American chattering classes were busy checking the math in Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline—an unintentional parody of sociology in which Posner presents a top-100 list ranking writers and professors according to the number of times they turned up on television or Internet searches. Bourdieu, whose heaviest passages crackled with sardonic wit, would have had a wonderful time exploring this farcical project, which takes for granted that Henry Kissinger (No. 1), Sidney Blumenthal (No.7) and Ann Coulter (No. 74) are in the Rolodex because they are leading the life of the mind—why not include...