Richard Swedberg Famous Quotes
Reading Richard Swedberg quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Richard Swedberg. Righ click to see or save pictures of Richard Swedberg quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
The conventional way of understanding taste, according to Distinction, is to view it as a capacity for aesthetic judgments in areas such as music, art, and literature. Though rarely made explicit, it is well understood that taste can be found only among the elite, and that the lower classes lack it. Bourdieu argues that it is imperative to break with this concept of taste and replace it with one that is sociological in nature. In order to do so, Bourdieu expands the concept of taste from including only "aesthetic consumption" to including "ordinary consumption," that is, the consumption of clothing, furniture, and food ([1979] 1986:100). He also extends the concept of taste to all social classes, and shows that what constitutes "good taste" is very much part of the struggle for domination in society.
While much of postmodernist analysis should be credited with theoretical imagination, as well as talent for capturing something of the Zeitgeist, this type of analysis nonetheless misses some crucial facts about consumption: that consumption is vitally linked to production; consumption is anchored in concrete relations; and the driving force in consumption is individual interest, as encouraged and often shaped by profit interests.
Throughout this book I have tried to point out why interest, especially as it has been used by people such as Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, and Weber, is still a very useful concept. One reason why the concept of interest imparts a distinct dynamic to the analysis is that it is mainly interest which makes people takes action. It supplies the force that makes people get up at dawn and work very hard throughout the day. Combined with interests of others, it is a force that can move mountains and create new societies.
