Pierre Bourdieu. Sur l’État: Cours au Collège de France (1989–1992). Paris: Raisons d’agir / Seuil, 2012

Pierre Bourdieu taught for twenty years at the College de France, where he held the Chair of Sociology from 1981 to 2001. The College de France is the most prestigious academic institution in France but also a very peculiar one: access to instruction is open, free of charge, and does not lead to any diploma. Its mission is to teach “science in making,” a motto which applies quite well to the three years of teaching that Bourdieu dedicated between 1989 and 1991 to the question of the state. Collected in the present book by editors Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Franck Poupeau, and Marie-Christine Riviere, these teachings represent both a turning point in Bourdieu’s intellectual trajectory and the living foundations of important works that would follow, such as La Misere du monde (1993) and Les Structures sociales de l’economie (2000).