Volume 33, Number 6 · April 10, 1986
Monsieur Taste
By Stanley Hoffmann
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Richard Nice
Harvard University Press, 613 pp., $29.50
In 1963, and again in 1967 and 1968, approximately twelve hundred French men and women in Paris and Lille and in a small provincial town were asked to answer questions about their tastes in furniture, clothes, food, TV programs, music, paintings, and photos. These answers, extensive interviews, and various other surveys are the basis of Pierre Bourdieu's enormously ambitious attempt to create a sociology of aesthetic judgment. His book was published in France in 1979. Bourdieu was already famous (his enemies would say 'notorious') for his works of the 1960s on the French educational system. In these works he asserted that this system was little more than a machine of the French bourgeoisie to 'reproduce' itself, since only people from that class had the 'cultural capital' needed for educational success.
Review, 5624 words
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