La Misère du monde

"Confined to their governmental ivory towers, and with their eyes fixed on the opinion polls, politicians and state officials are all too often oblivious to the lives of their citizens. On the other hand, the ordinary men and women who have so much hardship in their lives, and so few means to make themselves heard, either protest outside the official frameworks or remain locked in the silence of their despair. Under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, a team of sociologists spent three years analysing the new forms of social suffering that characterize contemporary societies - the suffering of those who are denied the means of acquiring a socially dignified existence, as well as the suffering of those who are poorly adjusted to the rapidly changing condition of their lives. Declining housing estates, the school, the family, street-level state services, the everyday world of social workers and policemen, factory workers and white-collar clerks, the universe of farmers and artisans, of teachers and the unemployed and partly employed: these are just some of the spaces where conflict occurs, where specific discriminations and recriminations, tensions and contradictions abound and accumulate, and where new forms of suffering are produced.