GP em Antropologia e Sociologia das Emoções

Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur.

By Michael Grenfell (London: Continuum, 2004), VIII + 214 pp. ISBN: 0826467083

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By Mauro Guilherme Pinheiro Koury

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In Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur, Michael Grenfell, a recognized authority on the subject, examines the work and the life of the recently deceased French sociologist. As suggested by the subtitle, Agent Provocateur, Grenfell affirms that Bourdieu’s work stirs men to action.
The book is divided into three parts. The first presents a brief biography of Bourdieu and examines his main theoretical concepts.

The second offers a deep analysis of Bourdieu’s attitude to the Algerian Crisis, presents Bourdieu’s views on education as the training field of the state, and discusses the relationship between his conceptions of the aesthetic and the media with those of culture and society.

The third part is devoted to Bourdieu’s political views, and calls attention to his book published in 1993, La Misere du Monde, on the poverty of experience of common citizens based on a series of ‘‘eyewitness’’ accounts.

This section still focuses on the militant side of Bourdieu, emphasizing his critique of capitalism and his opposition to the military actions of the West in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.

This book offers a coherent and valuable reading of Bourdieu’s work, addressing the key questions of the social and political world, the links and alliances of present day society. Grenfell discusses the implications of Bourdieu’s work, evaluating the use and continuity of his ideas for the twenty-first century.

Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur presents a comprehensive picture of Pierre Bourdieu — as man, militant and intellectual. Without doubt, this work is of incalculable value for students, researchers and scholars working on social theory.

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[Publicado na revista The European Legacy, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 457–458, 2006]

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