Bourdieu's material is a French survey of 1,217 people carried out in 1963 and 1967-68, asking what respondents liked in painting, music, furniture, clothing and cooking, and what they knew about each.

Two findings organise everything that follows: cultural practice tracks educational qualification first and father's occupation second, and the same social logic runs through the whole range of preferences, so that a taste in art predicts a taste in food. The concepts built on this — cultural capital as an inheritable asset convertible into money and position, habitus as the unifying principle behind a group's preferences, the field of legitimating institutions that decides what counts as art — dissolve the separation between class and status that sociology had inherited.

The argument is aimed squarely at the philosophical tradition that treats aesthetic judgement as disinterested. There is no standing outside the game, Bourdieu insists; the sociologist is in it too, and must say so.