In this short but dense piece, written for a special issue of the journal L'Arc devoted to the medieval historian Georges Duby (whose sprawling oeuvre Bourdieu admired and drew on for its scrupulous genealogy of the mental-cum-social structure of the feudal triad of knight, priest, and peasant: see Georges Duby, The Three Orders (1982 [1978]), Bourdieu sums up and clarifies the core thesis of Distinction just as he was completing the book. This article is valuable for (1) stating forthrightly Bourdieu's conception of the 'double objectivity' of the social world and spotlighting the recursive constitution of social and mental structures; (2) stressing the performative capacity of symbolic forms and their multi-level implication in social struggles over and across social divisions; and (3) suggesting alluring parallels and obstinate differences between Bourdieu's 'genetic structuralism '
and both the literary vision of Marcel Proust and the marginalist microsociology of Erving Goffman -two of his favorite mental 'sparring partners.' In all, this article illuminates how Bourdieu mingled Marx's sensuous materialism, Durkheim's teachings on classification (later extended by Cassirer), and Weber's insights into hierarchies of honor into a sociological model of class all his own -LW.
To be noble is to squander; it is an obligation to appear; it is to be sentenced, on pain of degradation, to luxury and to spending. I would even say that this tendency to prodigality asserted itself at the beginning of the thirteenth century as a reaction to the social ascent of the newly rich. To distinguish yourself from villeins, you must outclass them by showing that you are more generous than they are. The testimony of literature is conclusive on this point: what opposes the knight to the upstart? The latter is stingy, while the former is noble because he spends all that he has, joyfully, and because he is drowning in debt.