AWKWARD SCIENCE We have summarized the essential of this book by the author. Sociology is a science, for Bourdieu, since and insofar as he distanced himself from social philosophy. That is, to the extent that it appropriated CONCEPTS, METHODS, CONSISTENT SYSTEMS OF HYPOTHESIS AND VERIFICATION PROCEDURES. Not all sociologists deserve the name of scientists because the methodology varies from author to author, getting GRADUALLY closer, some more than others, to the ideal of scientific verification. However, it is common for them to question the scientific character of sociology, even in the cases of greater methodological rigor, and attack it because many of the statements that this science makes uncomfortable (because sociology calls into question the other sciences).

We have summarized here the essential of this book by the author. THE SCIENTIFIC FIELD For Bourdieu there are a series of FIELDS whose work in society is to support SYMBOLIC PRODUCTION. Examples of them would be the intellectual, artistic, religious, haute couture, etc. What Bourdieu's field theory investigates is the way each of them works. The form means exactly WHAT SOCIAL CONDITIONS. Bourdieu states that any sociology of science must start from the fact that THE TRUTH OF THE PRODUCT OF SCIENCE RESTS IN ITS SPECIFIC CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION. The SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSE IS NOT A PURE UNIVERSE. THE RELATIONSHIPS OF FORCE, STRATEGIES, MONOPOLIES THAT GOVERN IN ANY OTHER SOCIAL FIELD ARE VALID.

The essays in the book reflect Pierre Bourdieu's.

This book is based on the last course of lectures that Pierre Bourdieu delivered at the College de France. In it he presents a highly illuminating 'Sketch for a self-analysis', applying his theories to himself to show how his social origins and educational capital influenced his academic trajectory and the course of his thinking. It is a book that will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities.

A key feature of those who work for the state, in the legal system and in public services is that they claim to be putting their own personal interests aside and working in a disinterested fashion, for the public good. But is disinterested behaviour possible? Can law be treated as a set of universal rules that are independent of particular interests, or is this mere ideology? Is the state bureaucracy a universal class, as Hegel thought, or a structure that serves the interests of the dominant class, as Marx claimed? In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in 1987–88 and 1988–89, Pierre Bourdieu addressed these questions by examining the formation of the legal and bureaucratic fields characteristic of the modern state, uncovering the historical and social conditions that enable a social group to form and find its own interests in the very fact of serving interests that go beyond it. For a disinterested universe to emerge, it needs both the invention of a public service, or a spirit of service to the public cause, and the creation of a social universe in which individuals can pursue a career devoted to public service and be rewarded for it. In other words, it requires a process of specialization whereby autonomous, specific fields become established in the social cosmos within which a special kind of game that follows the rules of disinterest can be played out. By reconstructing the conditions under which an interest in disinterestedness emerged, Bourdieu sheds new light on the formation of the modern state and legal system and provides a fresh perspective on the many professions in modern societies that are oriented towards the service of the common good.

Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fascination, he turns his attention to the figure of the French intellectual. From his student years in Paris, Sand has repeatedly come up against the "great French thinkers." He has an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual world and its little secrets, on which he draws to overturn certain myths attaching to the figure of the "intellectual" that France prides itself on having invented. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, he revisits a history that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Eric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the elites, he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and mordant.

Examining in detail the work of consecration carried out by elite education systems, Bourdieu analyzes the distinctive forms of power—political, intellectual, bureaucratic, and economic—by means of which contemporary societies are governed.