Classification Struggles comes 4 years after their French release and marks the first of a five-volume series of lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France. This first volume covers issues in ‘general sociology’, building on and extending classical social theory. As Bourdieu begins, he explains that the lectures could be taken in any sequence (p. 4), but that the point is to convey his method. He is clear that he is not proclaiming dogma (p. 4), or typologies – which he calls ‘epistemological monstrosities’ (p. 10), because they conflate divisions from reality with the sociologist’s constructed classifications. Instead, he takes the reader through the fundamentals of the classification of social groups.

O’Neill, Brian F. 2019. Review of Pierre Bourdieu’s Classification Struggles. In Sociological Research Online. DOI 10.1177/1360780419875154