Places de Max Weber et Gaston Bachelard chez Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

Can we better understand Pierre Bourdieu's sociology by appealing to the intellectual references he made use of in his works? Not really, because confronting Bourdieu with the classical sources he relies on, as Marx, Weber or Bachelard, the reader can note a rather lax exercise of the concepts he is borrowing and he is making his. Or, this insight in Bourdieu's work takes the opposite way, as it tries to analytically read Bourdieu intellectual project on building sociology as science by starting from the very intellectual instruments he is claiming to use. Following the way Weber’s and Bachelard's concepts and scientific outlines are transferred into Bourdieu general argumentation, the study emphasize the way the famous French sociologist frequently does not avoid the epistemological traps those classical authors warned about. Moreover, this kind of insight is able to disclose behind the global coherence of Bourdieu's scientific project the political meaning of Bourdieu sociology.