ROSE SARTIE: It seems to me that your plan is to provide tools that will allow the disintegration of mechanisms of domination, which function as natural, normal, ancestral separations, which, I believe, is rather contrary to the stereotypical image that has been created for your work, which is treated as if it reveals limitations that crush individuals without granting them any place.

PIERRE BOURDIEU: If I wanted to respond with a sentence to what you said, I would say: we are born predetermined and we have a small chance to end up free. I blame those who excessively invoke freedom, the subject, the individual, etc. for trapping social actors in the illusion of freedom, that is, in one of the ways through which determinism is applied. Only under the condition of appropriating the tools of thought, as well as the objects of thought that we acquire, can we become somewhat the subject of our thoughts; under the condition, among other things, of re-appropriating the knowledge of determinisms.

In 1988, historian Rose Sartie invited sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the France Culture radio station for a series of five interviews, which this book reproduces and restores within their intellectual and political context. In a dialogue where their convergence and clear awareness of their differences are revealed simultaneously, the sociologist and the historian compare their two disciplines and their respective roles in society.

"The value of this small book lies, I think, in capturing through the liveliness of the dialogue Bourdieu's way of thinking, liberating him from whatever sometimes covers him, whether it is the imposing authority conferred by his position at the College de France or the polemical disputes of the sociologist involved in his time."
from the Foreword by R.S.