Sketch for a Self-analysis

"Sketch for a Self-Analysis" is the ultimate outcome of Pierre Bourdieu's lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu's theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time - including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir - as well as Bourdieu's own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria.

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Levi-Strauss - a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was professor of sociology at the College de France. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty works, including Distinction, Homo Academicus, Pascalian Meditations, On Television, State Nobility, Acts of Resistance, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, and Science of Science and Reflexivity, the last two also published by the University of Chicago Press.