SOURCE: Olson, Lester C. Review of Language and Symbolic Power, by Pierre Bourdieu. Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 4 (November 1995): 522-23.

In the following review, Olson characterizes Language and Symbolic Power as “one of the most intellectually stimulating books about language.”

Because he examines the sociological aspects of language, Pierre Bourdieu, a Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France, has written a series of essays that are rich in implication for students of rhetoric, communication and media. Most the essays were published earlier in French in Ce que parler veut dire, but this volume of translated essays [Language and Symbolic Power] does contain five additional essays and omits two from the earlier volume.

Bourdieu's essays argue that language expresses and reproduces the social structure (2). He takes issue with the ideal of an autonomous symbol system, especially as articulated by linguists Saussure and Chomsky. Bourdieu argues that we...