Science of Science and Reflexivity - Softcover

Bourdieu, Pierre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226067386 ISBN 13: 9780226067384

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Synopsis

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan—a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his.

Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research—that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.

Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces.

A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

One of the world’s leading social thinkers, Bourdieu’s work has become increasingly influential throughout the social sciences and humanities. In this new book he embarks on a sociological analysis of science and its legitimacy.

Bourdieu argues that that emergence of the social sciences has had the effect of calling in to question the objectivity and validity of scientific activity, by relating it to its historic conditions. It is this relativistic and at times nihilistic interpretation of science that Bourdieu sets out to challenge, in an attempt to combine an accurate vision of the scientific arena with a realist theory of knowledge. The book also offers an elaboration of Bourdieu’s notion of the scientific field and uses it to address a range of issues and debates in the natural and social sciences.

This is a clear and accessible introduction to Bourdieu’s views on science that will appeal to students of sociology, philosophy and the social sciences.

About the Author:

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology, the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and the publishing house Raisons d’agir Editions until his death in 2002. He was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century as well as a leading public intellectual involved in the global mobilization against neoliberalism. He authored numerous classics of sociology and anthropology. Among them are Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Homo Academicus, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field, and Pascalian Meditations.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226067386
• ISBN 13: 9780226067384
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168