February 8, 2002

Pierre Bourdieu: Reason and Passion

By RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

French philosophy is famous for radical theory in the service of progressive social causes. If Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire propelled this tradition in the 18th century (inspiring the French Revolution), Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault defined it in recent times by wielding their erudition and symbolic power to wage war in arenas of social struggle far beyond the campus gates. They drew mass publics, not just media citations. After the death of Foucault, in 1984, Pierre Bourdieu