Pierre Bourdieu: The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution

Bourdieus entire oeuvre was indeed motivated by the failed promise of the French Revolution and by the demise of its most noble ideals. His passionate analyses—of educational stratification, cultural production and consumption, gender relations, the social structure of the economy, and the effects of globalization—were always carried out with the moral benchmark of the revolution in mind. Bourdieu was indeed passionately tied to the values of the French Revolution, notably to liberty and meritocracy, to social equality and to the democratization and universalization of government. But wherever he looked, he saw those values betrayed by the very people who argued for their implementation, and by the governmental bodies which were devised in order to guarantee their effectiveness. Committed to the values of the Declaration, he was constantly frustrated by the betrayals of universalization by the Fifth Republic.