Pascalian Meditations

A synthesis of forty years work by France s leading sociologist, this book pushes the critique of scholarly reason to a new level. It is a brilliant example of Bourdieu s unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. Pascalian Meditations makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of scholasticism, a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers, unwilling to engage these presuppositions in their practice, have brought them into the order of discourse, not so much to analyze them as to legitimate them. This situation is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique.