Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin, a small village in the Béarn region of southwest France, the son of a postal worker and the grandson of a sharecropper. He was the first member of his family to complete secondary school, and his trajectory through the French educational system — from a provincial lycée to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris — gave him a uniquely ambivalent vantage point on an institution that simultaneously opened and foreclosed possibility. He studied philosophy under Louis Althusser at the ENS, undertook fieldwork in Algeria during the war of independence in the late 1950s, and returned to France to develop a sociology rooted in both rigorous empirical inquiry and broad theoretical ambition. He held positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales before being appointed to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in 1981, a position he held until his death. Over five decades he produced an extraordinary body of work spanning education, art, language, religion, politics, and the theory of practice, always insisting that sociology must account for the material conditions that produce symbolic distinctions. In his final years he became a prominent public intellectual, speaking out against neoliberal globalisation and the dismantling of the welfare state. He died in Paris on 23 January 2002, and his concepts — habitus, capital, field, symbolic violence — remain among the most widely cited tools in the social sciences and in educational research.

Bourdieu's concept of habitus is perhaps his most influential contribution to educational theory. He defined habitus as the system of durable, transposable dispositions — ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting — that individuals acquire through early socialisation and carry with them into every social field they inhabit. Habitus is not a set of explicit rules but an embodied grammar, acquired in practice through immersion in particular social environments, such that a child raised in a working-class household develops a habitus oriented toward the practical and the immediate, while a child raised in a cultivated bourgeois environment acquires a habitus oriented toward the abstract, the aesthetic, and the deferred gratification that formal education rewards. The concept explains why social inequalities reproduce themselves even in the absence of conscious discrimination: when the habitus of a student is misaligned with the habitus that schooling silently presupposes, the student is not merely disadvantaged but feels out of place, uncertain, and incapable of the “ease” that marks distinction.

Working with Jean-Claude Passeron, Bourdieu developed the concept of cultural capital to account for the non-economic resources — knowledge, skills, credentials, tastes, and modes of speech — that confer advantage in educational and labour markets. Cultural capital exists in three states: the embodied state (cultivated dispositions and competencies inscribed in the body through extended socialisation), the objectified state (cultural goods such as books, instruments, and works of art), and the institutionalised state (academic credentials that convert embodied culture into officially recognised qualifications). Their joint study of French university students, published as Les Héritiers in 1964, demonstrated empirically that academic success was not a function of natural intelligence but of the prior possession of cultural capital — and that the educational system, by treating cultural capital as though it were merit, systematically misrecognised class advantage as individual talent. This insight became the cornerstone of a sociology of education that exposes the mechanisms by which schools certify existing inequality as legitimate hierarchy.

Bourdieu introduced the concept of symbolic violence to describe the subtle, pervasive form of domination that operates not through physical coercion but through the imposition of categories of perception and appreciation that the dominated come to accept as natural and legitimate. In education, symbolic violence occurs whenever teachers communicate, through tone, vocabulary, assessment criteria, or curricular content, that certain ways of being, speaking, and knowing are inherently superior — and when students from dominated groups internalise this verdict as a judgement on their own capacities rather than as a reflection of arbitrary social hierarchies. The concept is closely linked to misrecognition: the dominated collaborate in their own subordination precisely because the social conditions that make certain dispositions appear “natural” or “excellent” are rendered invisible. Bourdieu argued that education cannot be reformed without confronting the symbolic dimensions of power that make inequality appear as difference in ability.

Bourdieu's concept of the field describes the semi-autonomous social arenas — educational, artistic, scientific, economic, political — in which agents occupy positions determined by their relative volumes of relevant capital and compete for the stakes that the field defines as valuable. The educational field has its own internal logic, its own forms of capital (academic credentials, pedagogical authority), and its own forms of competition (examinations, rankings, distinctions between disciplines and institutions). Bourdieu used field theory to analyse how elite educational institutions — the grandes écoles in France, the ancient universities in Britain — function as sites where the children of the dominant classes convert economic capital into cultural and social capital, reproducing elite networks while clothing the process in the meritocratic language of academic excellence. Field analysis also revealed how the structure of academic disciplines reflects not purely cognitive distinctions but social hierarchies among competing groups of scholars.

Bourdieu was attentive to the relative autonomy of educational institutions — their capacity to generate their own logic, traditions, and forms of resistance that are not simply reducible to the interests of dominant economic classes. This nuanced position distinguished him from cruder reproduction theories and allowed him to account for the ways in which schooling can produce unintended outcomes, create spaces for critique, and generate the very intellectuals who analyse and contest its operations. His concept of the scholastic point of view — the peculiar disposition toward theory, abstraction, and the suspension of practical urgency that academic life cultivates — was both a sociological description and a reflexive warning: scholars who forget that the conditions enabling their thought are socially produced tend to mistake scholastic problems for universal ones, thereby projecting the interests and categories of the academic field onto the populations they study.

Bourdieu consistently demanded that sociology turn its tools on itself, that researchers subject their own positions within the intellectual field — their institutional affiliations, their class trajectories, their disciplinary investments — to the same objectifying analysis they apply to other social agents. This reflexivity was not a counsel of paralysis but a precondition of scientific rigour: only a sociologist who understands how her position shapes her questions and her methods can claim to have partially transcended those conditions. In the context of educational research, Bourdieu's reflexive sociology implies that researchers must examine how their own educational trajectories, their own habitus formed in and by the academy, colour what they notice, what they treat as interesting, and what forms of knowledge they are prepared to recognise as legitimate. His legacy in education is thus not only a set of concepts but a methodological disposition — a permanent pressure toward self-examination in the practice of inquiry.

• The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture (1964; English translation 1979, with Jean-Claude Passeron)
• Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977, with Jean-Claude Passeron)
• The Forms of Capital (1986)
• The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1989; English translation 1996)
• Pascalian Meditations (1997; English translation 2000)