Friday, November 08, 2024

First Paragraph

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu grew up in a peripheral region of France, the son of a postal worker and a homemaker. His origins led him to be dismissed and looked down on in many of his early encounters with elite institutions. These encounters inculcated a sense of alienation and resentment toward mainstream elites that persisted throughout Bourdieu's life in spite of his later success. He emerged as a pugilistic public intellectual, and one of the most trenchant analysts of the ways that elites and elite aspirants jockeyed for status, influence, wealth, and power. His work exposed and catalogued the ways elites reproduced and justified their social position (and the inequalities entailed thereby) - often while claiming to be altruistic or pursuing the "greater good." Bourdieu's work plays an important role in shaping the arguments of this book. It will therefore be useful to highlight a few core elements of his thought to set the stage for what follows.

- From We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi

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