SOURCE: Paulson, William. “The Market of Printed Goods: On Bourdieu's Rules.” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 1997): 399-415.

In the following essay, Paulson proposes that although Bourdieu has remained constant in his opposition to social, cultural, and economic oppression, he presents a modified version of this argument in The Rules of Art.

In December 1995, during the second month of the largest wave of strikes and social protest France had seen since May 1968, Pierre Bourdieu was one of the leading intellectual figures to lend his support to the movement. Le Monde described his remarks as the high point of a string of speeches by the organizers of a published “Intellectuals' Appeal in Support of the Strikers.”¹ According to Bourdieu and his fellow intellectuals, the strikes were a “movement that has nothing of a defense of private interests, still less of privileges, but is, in fact, a defense of the most...