Pierre Bourdieu The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution

In Pierre Bourdieu: The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution, Gad Yair argues that Bourdieu appointed himself as the representative of the French people and acted as their National Assembly. In that capacity, he set himself to work with the charter of the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to remind the members of the social body of their rights and obligations; to monitor the legislative and executive powers and compare them with the Republican purposes of ideal political and social agendas decreed by the revolutionaries of 1789; and, overall, to maintain the tenet of the French constitution. In that sense, liked d'Artagnan in Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Bourdieu took it upon himself to be the fighter for true France-namely, the keeper of the Republican tradition of the French Revolution.

Gad Yair is associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropojogy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, and coauthor of The Golem in German Social Theory.