I believe that Pierre Bourdieu is best understood as a phenomenological sociologist and that, equally, responses to his work in the spirit of its production have also to be understood phenomenologically. I first offer a brief justification of that view. I then seek to clarify what I take to be the nature of Bourdieu's phenomenological orientation before proceeding to an elaboration of its implications both for our understanding of Bourdieu's work and for an assessment of the range of responses to his work presented in this volume. In the light of these preliminary remarks, I then offer reflections on each of the contributions as well as some concluding comments.

Bourdieu's Explicit References to Phenomenology

Bourdieu never wrote explicitly about the influence of the work of Edmund Husserl on his thinking. However, he did offer a few suggestive hints. Asked by Axel Honneth and others in an interview of 1985 what the intellectual situation was like when he was a student, Bourdieu replied,

Notice here that Bourdieu deliberately distinguishes between phenomenology and what he calls phenomenology ‘in its existentialist variety’. His comment also suggests that he was led back towards the work of Husserl by first reading Jean- Paul Sartre and then Maurice Merleau- Ponty.

Asked by his questioners whether he had ever been interested in existentialism, Bourdieu replied later in the same interview,