Pierre Bourdieu

Born and raised in a remote mountain village of the Pyrénées in southwestern France, Pierre Bourdieu moved to Paris in the early 1950s to study at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure at a time when philosophy was the queen discipline and the obligatory vocation of any aspiring intellectual. There he quickly grew dissatisfied with the 'philosophy of the subject' exemplified by Sartrian existentialism — then the reigning doctrine — and gravitated toward the 'philosophy of the concept' associated with the works of epistemologists Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Jules Vuillemin, as well as to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Shortly after graduation, however, Bourdieu forsook a projected study of affective life mating philosophy, medicine, and biology and, as other illustrious normaliens such as Durkheim and Foucault had done before him, he converted to social science.