Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Title: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Year: 1984 (French original, La Distinction, 1979)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Book
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste is a book by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, published in French as La Distinction in 1979 and in Richard Nice’s English translation by Harvard University Press in 1984. It argues that taste in music, art and food corresponds to education and social class, that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” and that taste is acquired in childhood through the habitus and through cultural capital. Its evidence is survey research conducted in France between 1963 and 1968, analyzed statistically, and it illustrates three zones of taste, legitimate, middlebrow and popular, with Bach, Gershwin and Johann Strauss II. In 1997 the members of the International Sociological Association ranked it sixth among the sociology books of the twentieth century. Research by Richard A. Peterson in the 1990s, which built on Bourdieu’s theory of taste, found high-status listeners more likely than others to like non-elite kinds of music and proposed a distinction between “omnivores” and “univores.”
Bourdieu, a French sociologist, published La Distinction in 1979, and Harvard University Press published Richard Nice’s translation in 1984.1 The book draws on research carried out in France between 1963 and 1968, chiefly the Kodak survey of 1963 and the taste survey of 1967, which Bourdieu and the statistician Salah Bouhedja analyzed with multiple correspondence analysis, a statistical method for mapping categorical answers against one another.2 Its subjects include taste in food, music and art.2
The book identifies “three zones of taste which roughly correspond to educational levels and social classes,” and gives musical examples of each: Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier for legitimate taste, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for middlebrow taste and Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube for popular taste.3 Bourdieu writes that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”: the people who judge are themselves placed by their judgments.4 The book contrasts the aesthetic of the dominant class with working-class taste, which, in Bourdieu’s words, expects “objects to fulfil a function.”2
The book explains taste through the habitus, the mental attitudes, personal habits and skills that people acquire in childhood within their class, and through cultural capital, which includes education, intellect, speech and dress.2 In his 1986 essay “The Forms of Capital”, Bourdieu described how economic advantage buys the time and schooling that produce cultural capital, which the school system rewards with credentials.5
In a 1997 survey of its members, the International Sociological Association ranked Distinction sixth among the books of sociology published in the twentieth century.6 Later research on musical taste built on Bourdieu’s theory.7 In 1992 Richard A. Peterson and Albert Simkus found that people in the highest occupational groups were more likely than others to like non-elite kinds of music, and that country and western was the only category that fit the pattern predicted by the opposition between elite and mass culture. They proposed replacing that opposition with one between omnivores and univores.7 In 1996 Peterson and Roger Kern, comparing surveys of 1982 and 1992, found that the number of lowbrow genres liked by highbrow respondents had risen from 1.74 to 2.23.7
Key contributions
- A survey-based map of taste against social position in France, across music, art and food.
- Three zones of taste, legitimate, middlebrow and popular, corresponding roughly to education and class and illustrated with musical examples.
- Taste as a classifier of the people who exercise it: “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
- The contrast between the aesthetic of the dominant class and a working-class taste that expects objects to serve a function.
- An account of taste through habitus and cultural capital, the dispositions and competences acquired in childhood within a class.
See also
- Performing Rites — Simon Frith’s 1996 study of value judgments in popular music
- Cultural omnivorousness — the debate over the omnivore finding
- Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
- Pop as craft — the case for pop as a craft
Footnotes
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Pierre Bourdieu, Wikipedia (accessed October 21, 2026); the 1984 edition per its Open Library record (accessed October 21, 2026): Harvard University Press, “translated by Richard Nice,” a translation of La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. ↩
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Distinction (book), Wikipedia (accessed October 21, 2026), which quotes the book on working-class taste and gives the habitus as “mental attitudes, personal habits, and skills.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Bourdieu, Distinction (1984), p. 16, as quoted in Dean Biron, “Betwixt and Between: Musical Taste Patterns and Audience Mobility,” Participations 6, no. 2 (November 2009) (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩
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Bourdieu, Distinction, as quoted in John Frow, “Accounting for Tastes: Some Problems in Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (1987): 59–73 (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩
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Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Greenwood, 1986), 241–58, translated by Richard Nice (accessed October 21, 2026). ↩
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International Sociological Association, “Books of the XX Century” (accessed October 21, 2026). ↩
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Richard A. Peterson and Albert Simkus, “How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups,” in Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907, both as summarized and quoted in “Social Hierarchy and Popular Culture,” Understanding Society, May 1, 2012 (accessed October 21, 2026). ↩ ↩2 ↩3
