What is a 'symbolic revolution'? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Édouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the Collége de France. This second volume of Bourdieu's previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet. Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the 'Impressionists', showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today - the very categories that we use everday to understand the representations of the world and the world itself. This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.

ピエール・ブルデューが遺した本書は、マネという異端児がいかにして「美の革命」を成し遂げたかを解き明かす、極めてスリリングな知の闘争記です。単なる美術評論の枠を超え、既成概念が崩壊し、新たな認識の地平が切り拓かれる「象徴革命」の瞬間を、社会学の鋭利なメスで鮮やかに描き出しています。 マネの筆致に込められた反逆の意志と、アカデミズムという巨大な権威に抗う孤独な戦い。私たちが現在、世界を捉える際に用いる「知覚のカテゴリー」そのものの誕生を追体験させる構成は圧巻です。芸術が社会を震撼させ、歴史を塗り替えるその瞬間の熱量を、ブルデューの情熱的な講義録を通じて全身で感じ取ってください。