Masterminds of critical social science thinking: 1. Pierre Bourdieu
Von webmaster • Feb. 10th, 2024 • Kategorie: InternationalBourdieu is one of the most influential social scientists, quoted across all disciplines. Namely with the notion he created, the “social capital”, he is quoted as a critic of capitalism standing up for the interests of the victims of capitalism, the have-nots.
His notion of a social capital, he indeed created against – as he phrases it – a one-sided view of only an economically conceptualized capital by economists, is generally interpreted, in the way, that he is saying, that people who are economically poor are only considered poor by this view of economical thinking, because this economically one sided concept of capital does not realize that these people do also own capital, their social capital. However, reading his famous and massively quoted essay “The forms of capital”, it turns out that his notion of social capital, is not at all arguing that economically poor people are after all also rich as owners of social capital. This is something all those people who refer to him read into his thoughts, and by quoting him for this interpretation are only reading such moral messages into his thought which made him worldwide famous, but what he is really thinking about is something else.