Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition

![CDATA[It is now over thirty years since Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction was first published in French, and nearly fifty years since the fieldwork the book draws on was conducted. Its influence over the intervening period has been quite extraordinary. It has arguably shaped the concerns of contemporary sociology more deeply and extensively than any other Single text, while its influence among arts and cultural theorists has been equally Significant. And if the book's concerns were informed by the French education and cultural policies of the 1960s, its theories and concepts have become a part of the vocabularies which now routinely inform the terms in which questions concerning the relations between such policies and questions of social stratification are posed. Yet if this is an astonishing accomplishment it is also a surprising one for a book centrally preoccupied with the Sociology of taste. Questions concerning the relationships between tastes and society had a Significant influence on the early development of the social sciences. The role of tastes in ordering the relations between different social groups in market societies was a central preoccupation of David Hume, for example, as well of Adam Smith. However, the subsequent development of philosophical aesthetics, particularly under the influence of Immanuel Kant, separated questions concerning the exercise of the faculty of aesthetic judgement from more empirical and mundane considerations concerning the role of tastes in everyday social life. This was not entirely true-questions of taste remained important in the Sociologies of Georges Simmel and Thorsden Veblen-but their role in the work of the more central figures of 'classical Sociology' (Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, for example) was less Significant.]]