With Pierre Bourdieu’s death from cancer in 2002, France lost one of its most active and significant intellectuals. Having written over 25 books and founding the magazine Liber in 1989, Bourdieu was a leading voice for the left, both in France and throughout the world.
In Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 , seven of Bourdieu’s speeches from 1999–2000 are collected in this slim volume. Unfortunately for Bourdieu, his final written attempt to exposit the danger of the capitalist market is a failure. His words come off as if they are the desperate, rambling plea of a disgruntled ideologue in the winter of his life. Worried that after dozens of books his message still hasn’t been consumed, he offers 96 pages of clichéd, socialistic vitriol.
His thesis is two-fold: first, he attempts to implicate the market-driven ideology of neo-liberalism for most of society’s ills, and second, he calls on intellectuals to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Emile Zola; there must be an active resistance to market-driven tyranny, not resigned criticism.
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The battle for liberty is in the end a battle over ideas. If Firing Back is the last testament of one of the greatest intellectuals on the left, the struggle for freedom and capitalism is indeed a hopeful one. Yet for all his erroneous claims, Bourdieu’s spirit represents what Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek envied in the socialists, viz. the courage to dream big (although in Bourdieu’s case, to dream horribly wrong). This book represents a romantic plea for radical participation, a sentiment not often found among the capitalist intellectuals. While the world can live without the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, it could use his sense of passion.
http://mises.org/daily/1458/
While I agree that lot’s of what P ierre Bourdieu uttered is leftist garbage. There has been some more solid thought inbetween this concerning human behaviour, valuation etc. Cleansing this from the Marxist undertones his reflexive sociology and various other ideas by him could become pretty useful for exploring economics and politics. Yes, and that could also point out some flaws Marxist, Statist and even Libertarian or Anarchist thinking. To do it, one of course needs to want it.