SOURCE: Bourdieu, Pierre, and Günter Grass. “A Literature from Below: Günter Grass and Pierre Bourdieu.” Nation (3 July 2000): 25-8.

In the following interview, originally published in French and German, Grass and Bourdieu discuss the role of intellectuals in society, centering on topics such as sociology, literature, economics, and world politics.

The role of the public intellectual—and the moral onus, assuming that one exists—seems ever to thread the Scylla of celebrity and the Charybdis of marginality. In a conversation printed in part simultaneously in the French daily Le Monde and German weekly Die Zeit, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Nobel laureate Günter Grass discussed the role of intellectuals in society, stylistic practices in sociology and literature, neoliberal economics, the emerging world order and other topics. The following is adapted from a translation from the French by Deborah Treisman. Bourdieu is a professor of philosophy at the...