Review of Bourdieu (2022). Retour sur la réflexivité

Abstract

Two decades after the death of Pierre Bourdieu, Jérôme Bourdieu and Johan Heilbron have just published a work entitled Retour sur la réflexivité, consisting in four articles by one of the most important sociologists of the second half of the 20th century. It deals with unknown dimension of Pierre Bourdieu’s work and allows us to perceive the evolution of his thought, which moves from epistemological vigilance to reflexivity understood as a vector of objectification that allows for awareness, better knowledge and a practice to try to mitigate the effects of a series of biases. In this sense, it moves away from a narcissistic and intimate vision of reflexivity, in favour of a mobilisation of the instruments of the social sciences at the service of the objectification of scientific work and the revealing of the social conditions in which it is carried out.