Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

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Pierre Bourdieu

Translated by Richard Nice

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1984, 1987, 2010, English; originally published 1979 in French

Nonfiction, General

ISBN: 9780674212770

From the Publisher. No judgment of taste is innocent—we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book 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. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions—that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. This fascinating work 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 judgment.

Translated by Richard Nice. Originally published in French as La distinction: critique sociale du jugement.

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Inga Sempé

On Inga Sempé’s Book List

In the same vein as Kitsch by Gillo Dorfles, this book contains more sociological explanations about the differences in taste among social classes

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