Distinction Book Summary - Distinction Book explained in key points

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Distinction summary

Name: Distinction
Rating: 4.6 (50 reviews)
Author: Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

4.6 (50 ratings)

46 mins

Topics

Class

Table of Contents

Distinction
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What’s in it for me? A groundbreaking theory about the relationship between taste and class.

Why do we like the things we like?

It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves. In our day-to-day lives, we usually just take our tastes for granted and act on them without too much consideration. When you’re hungry, you don’t ask yourself, “Gee, why do I like ratatouille so much?” You just let your predilection for rustic French cuisine help you make a decision about what to eat for dinner.

But it’s not just food. We have tastes that guide us in just about every choice we make about how we spend our time and money here on Earth – from the clothes we wear to the books we read and just about everything in between.

Hairstyles, home decor, hobbies, sports, newspapers, music, movies, art, and even the personality traits of the friends and partners we seek – you name it, you probably have certain tastes for it. And if you added up all your tastes, you’d be able to describe much of who you are as a person: what you do, what you own, what you want, whom you associate with, and how you present yourself to the world.

But where do our tastes come from? And what do they say about us? That’s what these blinks are all about.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

a new way of thinking about class;
the difference between economic and cultural capital; and
the hidden truth behind having “good taste” in art.

We associate different tastes with different social classes.

Imagine two people with very different tastes in leisure activities. The first person likes to attend classical music concerts and visit art museums, while the second prefers to watch wrestling matches and go to amusement parks.

Now, if you had to guess, to which social class would you say each person probably belongs?

Chances are, you’d say the first person probably belongs to a much “higher” class than the second one. And that’s because all of us have intuitions about taste that are strongly tied up with our ideas about class.

The key message here is: We associate different tastes with different social classes.

Generally speaking, we tend to divide both tastes and classes along a scale that goes from low to high. At the bottom of the scale, there are the “popular” tastes of the working class. Next up, there are the “middle-brow” tastes of the middle class. And at the highest end, there are the “bourgeois” tastes of the upper class, along with what sociologists call the “legitimate” tastes of the cultural elite.

The cultural elite includes the more “refined” members of the upper class but also thought-leaders and taste-makers like intellectuals and artists. They may not be affluent, but they do have a lot of cultural cachet, so their tastes carry a lot of weight.

Now, the details of all these tastes vary from culture to culture. They also change from one era to the next. They can even differ within the same society during the same time period based on factors beyond class, such as ethnicity, gender, age, and place of residence. For instance, residents of trendy and happening cities tend to have more “fashionable” tastes than people in small, sleepy towns – even if they’re members of the same class.

It’s, therefore, impossible to give any timeless, universal examples here. The ones that author Pierre Bourdieu focuses on are drawn from 1960s France, so many of them will seem dated or culturally specific to us now. For instance, back then, “The Blue Danube” was an example of popular French taste in music, while “Hungarian Rhapsody” was middle-brow, and “Concerto for the Left Hand” was “legitimate.” Nowadays, many people wouldn’t even be familiar with any of these pieces of music.

But Bourdieu invites us to apply his ideas to our own cultural contexts, so let’s take him up on that invitation for a moment. In your society today, what would you consider popular, middle-brow, and legitimate tastes in music?

We don’t want to offend anyone by calling their favorite artist “middle-brow,” so you fill in the blanks here.

To scientifically understand people’s tastes, we must take into account their ordinary ways of thinking about them.

Common sense provides us with a starting point for investigating taste, but it’s just that: a starting point. As we’ll see, there’s definitely an identifiable relationship between taste and class, so it’s put us on the right track. But common sense isn’t a scientifically rigorous foundation on which to build a theory. As a sociologist, Bourdieu wanted to conduct a more intellectually sophisticated, empirically established inquiry.

So what should we do? Set aside our common sense and try to start from scratch? Not quite – and that’s because of one of the peculiar aspects of studying a social phenomenon like taste.

People’s ideas about taste and class play an active role in shaping the realities of taste and class.

Alright, so people’s tastes are influenced by the way they think about the relationship between taste and class. It’s a bit of a mouthful to put into words, but the idea itself is fairly straightforward. So why’s it so important?

Well, this idea has some major ramifications for our understanding not only of taste but also of class. Now, taste might seem like a fairly narrow topic of interest, but class is one of the central concepts of sociology, along with some important schools of thought in other social sciences, such as Marxist economics and history. That makes the next idea we’re going to look at crucial for anyone who wants to understand society.

Bourdieu advanced a hypothesis that builds on and refines our intuitions about the relationship between taste and class.

OK, so our common-sense ideas about taste and class are definitely important – but we still need to go beyond them if we want to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between the two things. For that, we’ll need some empirical data to study. Back in the 1960s, Bourdieu realized that himself, so he launched a pair of extensive, in-depth surveys.

Now, when you conduct a survey, the responses you get are highly dependent on the questions you ask. After all, there’s an infinite number of questions you could ask your respondents. And if you ask two very different sets of questions, you’ll get two very different sets of answers.

Our notions about taste and class represent a “misrecognized” form of practical knowledge.

Pop quiz: if you drop a bowling ball and a feather from a roof, which one will hit the ground first? The bowling ball, of course. Why? Because it’s heavier, many people would say.

Now, if you know your physics, you know that’s not true and that it’s a matter of air resistance rather than weight. But even if you have a confused understanding of why objects fall the way they do on Earth, that wouldn’t stop you from making the correct choice. In other words, you’d have practical knowledge about the physics of falling objects, but, to use one of Bourdieu’s terms, you’d misrecognize that knowledge when trying to explain it – misattributing the difference in velocities to weight when you should be attributing it to air resistance.

Taste and class have three dimensions: volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory.

So what’s our overly simplistic folk theory about taste and class? Well, in dividing the two things on a scale that goes from low to high, we’re essentially putting forward a one-dimensional hierarchy. The scale is a vertical line, and each type of taste and class represents a position on the line. If you’ve ever talked about people climbing or falling down the socio-economic “ladder,” you’ve used this model yourself when talking about class.

Now, for everyday conversation, the ladder serves its purpose, but if we want to develop a more scientifically precise understanding of class and taste, we need to go beyond it. And that brings us to Bourdieu’s hypothesis, which is that we can understand class and taste in terms of a three-dimensional space rather than a one-dimensional line.

Our social status reflects our economic and cultural capital, and we can convert one type of capital into the other.

“Composition of capital” and “social trajectory” – the words sound technical, but the ideas themselves are pretty straightforward. However, this wouldn’t be French theory if things were simple, so there’s another complication to add to the mix. It has an even more technical-sounding name: capital reconversion strategies. But the idea itself isn’t that difficult, so stick with us!

The key message here is: Our social status reflects our economic and cultural capital, and we can convert one type of capital into the other.

People protect and improve their social status by converting economic capital and cultural capital into each other.

A person’s social trajectory can change for many reasons. A decline could be the result of personal misfortune, like someone blowing her savings on a failed business venture.

But oftentimes, a shift in a person’s overall volume of capital is tied up with the ebbs and flows of the economy and society as a whole. These larger tidal forces tend to lift up or drag down whole groups of people who are in similar socio-economic boats, so to speak. Here’s where capital reconversion strategies often come to the fore.

People’s tastes are correlated to their class positions within the three-dimensional space of the social hierarchy.

So, what does any of this have to do with taste? Don’t worry; we’re getting there. We’ve been gradually building up the concepts we need to grasp to understand Bourdieu’s hypothesis. Now we’re finally getting to the main event.

Ready? Let’s go!

The correlations between taste and class can be further clarified by accounting for social trajectory.

So far, so good? Great – because now we’re going to have to add a couple of wrinkles to the picture. But don’t worry – it’s not going to get that much more complicated.

Here’s the thing: that X-Y graph we looked at in the previous blink is essentially a two-dimensional representation of society. It just accounts for people’s volume of capital and composition of capital. But remember, there’s also a third dimension: social trajectory. To round out our picture, we need to add this factor into the mix.

Pierre Bourdieu’s survey results confirmed his hypothesis.

Alright, so that was the hypothesis Bourdieu had in mind when he created his surveys. If he’s right, people’s tastes should correspond to their volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory.

So now comes the big question: was the hypothesis correct? Did the surveys bear it out?

People’s tastes emerge out of and reflect the material conditions of their class positions.

So which tastes correspond to which class positions? Large portions of Distinction cover the answer to this question in painstaking detail.

But unless you’re really interested in 1960s French society, the specifics aren’t that interesting in and of themselves, so we’re going to skip over most of them and start to wrap things up on a more general level.

People’s tastes are ultimately rooted in their habitus.

Let’s recap: the material conditions of people’s lives lead them to develop certain dispositions toward things like food and clothing. These dispositions, in turn, manifest themselves as tastes – preferences for one type of food over another, for example.

Now, imagine if you took all of someone’s dispositions toward all of the areas of taste – not just food and clothing, but furniture, books, music, art, hobbies, and so forth. The result would be something Bourdieu calls a habitus – the final technical term we’ll be tackling in these blinks.

The tastes of the affluent elite provide them with a way of marking themselves off from other classes.

If you took everything we just said about the working class and put it in reverse, you’d have a pretty accurate description of the habitus of the affluent members of the cultural elite.

Because of their wealth, these people’s survival is all but assured, and they have plenty of time and money to devote to the non-essential elements of their food, clothing, and just about anything else. They can, therefore, afford to overlook the substance and utility of things and focus more on their formal and esthetic dimensions.

Taste provides us with a way of making class distinctions.

So those are the broad strokes of Bourdieu’s theory of the relationship between taste and class. From here, the details become increasingly complicated, as he drills down deeper and deeper into the fine distinctions between the different tastes of different class fractions within each of the main social classes of 1960s France.

However, we now have enough of an overview of Bourdieu’s theory to be able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what it’s telling us.

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What is Distinction about?

Distinction (1979) is widely considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century sociology. Drawing on extensive empirical research and developing many new concepts that have had a lasting impact on the social sciences, it puts forward a groundbreaking theory about the relationship between taste and class.

Who should read Distinction?

Students of sociology
Fans of French theory
Anyone interested in the underpinnings of class or taste

About the Author

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. A professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the Collège de France in Paris, his academic work covered a wide array of subjects ranging from the sociological dimensions of education to aesthetics. He was the recipient of the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley, the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Médaille d'Or from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

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