In "Pascalian Meditations", Pierre Bourdieu, under the auspices of Blaise Pascal, attempts a systematic critique of scholastic thought, making explicit the assumptions that arise from the situation of the school, free time, liberated from the demands of the world and everyday existence. He demonstrates how this detached view of the world, characteristic of scholastic thought, often becomes a source of errors, systematic, scientific, ethical or aesthetic, with serious consequences for the way we understand the social and historical world, how it universalizes the particular case, silencing its historical and social conditions of possibility.

Bourdieu chooses Pascal precisely because his thinking approached those characteristics of human existence that scholastic thought systematically ignores - power, habit, body, automatic, imagination, contingency, possibility - because it rejects the investigation of foundations and calls for a symbolic revolution that the social sciences must accomplish in order to achieve their full emancipation.