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Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being

Ghassan Hage

$240

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
Duke University Press
14 October 2025
In Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, Ghassan Hage explores the great French social theorist’s work and revitalizes conventional and undertheorized aspects of his thinking. Hage focuses on Bourdieu’s concern with social being and what constitutes a worthwhile and fulfilling life. Such a life is not something that one either has or does not have; rather, society distributes and assigns values to ways of living. These values are structured by relations of power and domination and are subject to the outcome of political conflicts. Hage elucidates this political economy of being by reworking Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, illusion, symbolic capital, and field. In this political economy, one enjoys a worthwhile life to the degree that they are able to orient and deploy themselves practically in the world that surrounds them, have a sense of purpose, and achieve a level of social recognition. For Hage, the project of theorizing and understanding how people struggle to define, legitimize, and live a viable life in the face of symbolic domination permeates all of Bourdieu’s work.
By:  
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Country of Publication:   United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm, 
Weight:   572g
ISBN:   9781478029267
ISBN 10:   1478029269
Pages:   184
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne and the author of several books, including The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism and The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World.

Reviews for Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being

“Ghassan Hage offers an enlightened and lucid rereading of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory. With conceptual clarity, Hage shows that Bourdieu’s dual insistence on both the empirical and the philosophical, his emphasis to take seriously their entanglement is very productive and generative. A brilliant book.” - Françoise Vergès, author of Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism “Among the innumerable studies on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, Ghassan Hage’s essay stands out as a personal inquiry into unexplored tracks. Extracting unexpected gems from the French sociologist’s empirically grounded political philosophy, it is a thoughtful intellectual enterprise by one of the most original anthropologists of our time.” - Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study


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