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In addition to being a novelist, Édouard Louis, author of Change, is a scholar of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Louis's scholarly work has explicitly informed his novels, which are about the violence and indignity of poverty, the racism and homophobia of his working-class childhood, and the difficult act of moving between classes.
In 1979, Bourdieu published Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), which Louis called, in conversation with Stephen Patrick Bell for the LA Review of Books, "probably the most important book about social classes since the works of Karl Marx. For sociologists all around the world, it completely flipped the script on the old analysis of what social classes are."
Distinction was based on data collected in France in the 1960s and 1970s and is about the relationship between social classes, status groups, and cultural capital. Unlike theorists who came before him, Bourdieu's theory of class is that it is not ...
