Vol 33, No 2, October 1996

This article seeks to lay bare the central epistemological and theoretical principles that undergird Bourdieu's work by dissecting the analyses proposed in his book The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the New Mode of Domination (1989, transl. 1996). It is argued that this study offers not only a powerful and generalizable theoretical model of class rule in advanced society. It also contains lucid exemplifications of Bourdieu's core concepts and concerns, his theory of modes of domination and their specific contradictions, his rethinking of the "ontological correspondence" between agent and structure, and his views on the role of reason and intellectuals in history. It is suggested that Bourdieu's reconceptualization of the state as ultimate fetish and supreme symbolic power extends and renews his theory of cultural capital in a way that makes it directly pertinent to political sociology. The Theory of Fields and the Sociology of Literature: Reflections on the Work of Pierre Bourdieu Louis Pinto Cultures et Sociétés Urbaines, Paris