It's dated, overlong, and the prose is convoluted; however, the insights into the social construction of taste are thought provoking. Why do we like what we like? How much of our preferences are due to class envy, education, or economic circumstances?

The final chapter, on Kant's Critique of Judgment, shows how even so-called pure aesthetics is "grounded in an empirical social relation," how pleasure itself becomes part of the way "dominant groups...ride roughshod over difference, flouts distinction, [and] reduces the distinctive pleasures of the soul to the common satisfactions of food and sex."

Bourdieu also makes prescient comments on the tendencies of statisticians and sociologists to create artificial dichotomies and ends up suggesting that intellectuals may not be best placed to comment on bourgeois and working class taste. ( )

Wonderful work of obfuscation. ( )

L'analyse des relations entre les systèmes de classement (le goût) et les conditions d'existence (la classe sociale) qu'ils retraduisent sous une forme transfigurée dans des choix objectivement systématiques ("la classe") conduit ainsi à une critique sociale du jugement qui est inséparablement un tableau des classes sociale du jugement qui est inséparablement un tableau des classes sociales et des styles de vie.

Dense, but critical for understanding the connection between economic capital and cultural capital. ( )

(just a few chapters for class) ( )