Symbolic capital and social classes

In this short but dense piece, written for a special issue of the journal L'Arc devoted to the medieval historian Feorges Duby (whose sprawling oeuvre Bourdieu admired and drew on for its scrupulous genealogy of the mental-cum-social structure of the feudal triad of knight, priest, and peasant: see Georges Duby, The Three Orders (1982 1978), Bourdieu sums up and clarifies the core thesis of Distinction just as he was completing the book. This article is valuable for (1) stating forthrightly Bourdieu's conception of the 'double objectivity' of the social world and spotlighting the recursive constitution of social and mental structures; (2) stressing the performative capacity of symbolic forms and their multi-level implication in social struggles over and across social divisions; and (3) suggesting alluring parallels and obstinate differences between Bourdieu's 'genetic structuralism' and both the literary vision of Mercel Proust and the marginalist microsociology of Erving Goffman - two of his favorite mental 'sparring partners. 'In all, this article illuminates how Bourideu mingled Marx's sensuous materialism, Durkheim's teachings on classification (later extended by Cassirer), and Weber's insight into hierarchies of honor into a sociological model of class all his own - LW.