Illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. This book argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.
No judgement if taste is innocent - we are all snobs. First published in 1979, Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world. Focusing the French bourgeoisie its tastes and preferences Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life, we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu demonstrates that our aesthetic choices are distinctions that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. There is no pure aesthetics, no judgement of taste untainted by the power relations within which minute distinctions become the basis for social judgement.
'In this rich and probing guide to the strategies of pretension in contemporary France, Bourdieu describes how class segments separate from each other by their contrasting attitudes towards art and beauty.' - The Observer
