Outline of a Theory of Practice was first published in French in 1972 (Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique). However, this English text incorporates most of the changes which Pierre Bourdieu has made since then. The argument is carried further, particularly as regards the concepts of practical logic and symbolic capital, the order of exposition is recast, and, partly for reasons of space, the ethnographic chapters with which the French edition opens have been curtailed.

This text is the cornerstone of an oeuvre which encompasses numerous major works in both anthropology and sociology – which crosses and challenges the boundary dividing their objects, tasks, and theories, and forces attention to the social conditions in which such sciences are possible.

The fieldwork in Kabylia which provided the ethnographic basis for this text and the starting-point for its reflections was carried out amid the tragic circumstances of the Algerian war, which brought to a head the contradictions inherent in the ethnologist's position. This was one factor in Bourdieu's subsequent move into the field of sociology, where the separation which is the hidden condition of all academic activity – most insidiously so in the behavioural sciences – could itself be grasped scientifically in the course of inquiry into the social functions of scholarship and the mechanisms of cultural and social reproduction.