Loïc Wacquant

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book...

Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organise the world), social space (the distribution of...

At century’s close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists, and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban "underclass." Soon, this scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe, agitating the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book,...

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history, and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, which is at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and...