For lack of being able to offer here a systematic comparison between Bourdieu's sociology and the thought of Durkheim – which would require an historicalanalytic monograph capable of reconstituting the double chain, social and intellectual, of the ramifying causations that link them to each other and to their respective milieu – I would like, by way of selective soundings, to bring out four of the pillars that support their common base: namely, (1) the fierce attachment to rationalism, (2) the refusal of pure theory and the stubborn defence of the undividedness of social science, (3) the relation to the historical dimension and to the discipline of history, and (4) the recourse to ethnology as a privileged device for ‘indirect experimentation’.

I am quite conscious of the fact that such an exercise can all too easily take a scholastic turn and fall into two equally reductive deviations, the one consisting in mechanically deducing Bourdieu from Durkheim so as to reduce him to the rank of an avatar, the other in projecting back the theses dear to Bourdieu into Durkheim's work so as to attest to their intellectual nobility. Its aim is to bring out some of the distinctive features of that French School of sociology, which endures and enriches itself at the cost of sometimesunexpected metamorphoses.