Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu's interventions since the mass strikes and demonstrations that rocked France in December of 1995 have been the object of oft-violent condemnations by the Parisian journalists and media intellectuals whose power he mercilessly dissected in his writings on television and journalism. This compressed recapitulation spanning three decades shows that Bourdieu's political interventions cannot be separated from his scientific writings, even if the reading of his works has too often been neutralized by their academic conditions of reception. Hence, resituating the engagements of the sociologist in their historical and intellectual contexts thus leads not only to displacing the boundary between scientific research and political action. It also reveals the work of controlled conversion of social pulsion into critical intellectual impulsion that endows sociology with the epistemological vigilance necessary to break with the preconstructed social and political problems of current affairs.