Plural Actor - by Bernard Lahire (Paperback)

About the Book

First published in French as L'homme pluriel, Armand Colin, 2001.

Book Synopsis

The individual that the social sciences take as an object is most often studied in a particular context or from a single dimension. The actor is analysed as a student, worker, consumer, spouse, reader, sportsperson, a voter etc. However, in societies where individuals live often through simultaneously and successively heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory social experiences, each person inevitably carries a plurality of roles, ways of seeing, feeling and acting.

The aim of this study is to consider the ways in which this plurality of worlds and experiences are incorporated into the being of each individual and to observe the individual's actions in a variety of settings. In addition to his sociological viewpoint, the author engages with psychology, history, anthropology and philosophy. His reflections lead him to embark on a program of psychological sociology to highlight the complexities of this plural view of the social.

Review Quotes

"Lahire is disparaging of that 'umpteenth version of a theory of the free'; any feeling of freedom or ironic consciousness is simply the result of the complexity of that determination of whose actual weight individuals can have no practical intuition. But perhaps more than anything else, this book demonstrates the continuing validity and relevance - and for Bourdieuians 'more than ever' - of just such theories of freedom."
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Congratulations to Bernard Lahire for opening a new window. With the decline of primordial thinking (stressing race, class, gender, and nationhood), heightened by globalization, he suggests how to see, and conceptualize, the social world in an open, pluralistic mode. He builds on tradition, milieu, and context, but shows how thinking, goals, and a plurality of values combine in what we do."
Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago

About the Author

Bernard Lahire is the author of The Plural Actor, published by Wiley.