On the State Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 - 1992

"This is a major book for the social sciences. Unlike the majority of books on the state, it actually provides a basis for future empirical work on how states operate. Of the three kinds of books that have relevance for the academic reader--books to skim, books to read, and books to study--it is emphatically a book to study. One that is bold, profound and enlightening."
European Journal of Sociology
 
''The state is this institution that has the extraordinary power of producing a socially ordered world without necessarily giving orders, without exerting a constant coercion there isn?t a policeman behind every car, as people often say. This kind of quasi- magical effect deserves explanation. All other effects; military coercion, economic coercion by way of taxation are in my view secondary in relation to this. I believe that the initial accumulation, contrary to what is maintained by a certain materialist tradition (materialist in the impoverished sense of the term), is an accumulation of symbolic capital: the whole of my work is intended to produce a materialist theory of the symbolic, which is traditionally opposed to the material.''
Pierre Bourdieu