No judgement of taste is innocent
- we are all snobs Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world focusing on the tastes & preferences of the French bourgeoisie First published in 1979 the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France & a dissection of the bourgeois mind In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing & what we consider tacky merely trendy or ugly Taste is not pure Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions
- that is choices made in opposition to those made by other classes This fascinating work argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations & as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement