The Field of Fields. The State According to Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

A book published in 2012 included the publication of the lecture course on the State delivered by Pierre Bourdieu at the College de France. The course was given at a time when Bourdieu’s work had reached full maturity, and it completed, at the most generic level of significance —in the “geometral of all perspectives”— the analytical potential opened up by the main categories he used to approach the social world: habitus, field and, above all, capital or symbolic power, the true core of uncontested legitimacy and of the omnipresent domination that the state has acquired in the contemporary world.