Gathered in this volume are the texts of lectures given in memory of Pierre Bourdieu at an international colloquium held on 26-27 June 2003 and jointly organised by the Collège de France and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, with the backing of the Hugot Foundation.

The colloquium was prepared and co-ordinated by a scientific committee comprising Christian Baudelot, Jacques Bouveresse, Eric Brian, Christophe Charle, Roger Chartier, Philippe Descola, Roger Guesnerie, Rémi Lenoir, Daniel Roche and Loïc Wacquant.

The two-day colloquium was structured around four main themes, which seemed to provide a clear organisational form while at the same time encompassing the major aspects of Bourdieu's thinking and activities:

1. Forming, teaching, reforming

2. Construction of the sociological subject

3. Habitus, capital, and symbolic violence

4. Science and politics

This unique book is centred around a series of key issues in Bourdieu's thought and career: his determining contribution to the academic system and to the intelligentsia; his notion of the epistemology of his discipline and of the social sciences in general; the status in his thought of some crucial concepts, such as habitus, which play a fundamental role in understanding his work, but which continue to pose complex problems; his particular way of viewing relations between science and politics, and between scientific work, on the one hand, and social criticism and political action, on the other.

Contributors: Alban Bensa, Anna Boschetti Robert Castel, Aaron V. Cicourel, Jack Goody, Ian Hacking, Eric Hobsbawn, Harushita Kato, Jean-Claude Passeron, John Searle, Claude Seibel and Pierre-Etienne Will.