When one reads sociology textbooks or accounts of major trends and figures in the historical development of the discipline, there is a litany of names from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman – that appears over and over again. These figures are universally acknowledged as belonging to a list of scholars who built the theoretical foundations of the discipline. More recently, figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Dorothy Smith, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have been added to that list.

This Anthem Companions to Sociology series is noteworthy from our perspective because it is the first time that Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983) has been accorded a place in the pantheon. Hughes is largely unknown, or known by name only, to most practicing sociologists. He is rarely listed among ‘the masters’ by social theorists or historians of social thought and is usually missing from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and guides to the discipline. Nonetheless, it is our view that Hughes belongs on these lists. And there is a growing community of scholars spread across North America and Europe – France and Italy, in particular – who regards him as among the most innovative and original sociologists of the twentieth century. Moreover, he was – and is – more influential than would appear to be the case. The source of his impact? His conceptual/ theoretical influence on other high-profile scholars who were his students and colleagues (e.g., Howard S. Becker, David Riesman, Anselm Strauss, Eliot Freidson and Goffman) and his role in developing, nurturing and teaching the value of fieldwork.

Hughes’ contribution to North American sociology in the middle decades of the twentieth century is indisputable. Hughes, along with his wife, Helen MacGill Hughes, did his PhD at Chicago. While there, he became one of Park’ favourite students (Riesman 1983: 480). After an interval at McGill University in Montreal (1927–38), he returned and became a prominent member of the Chicago department between 1938 and 1961. While there, he championed the teaching of fieldwork methods and, by so doing, became a crucial figure in the ‘second Chicago School’ (Fine 1995).

Introduction

In his mature life, especially after the eighties and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pierre Bourdieu was one of the harshest critics of Europe as a political reality, or better as that political reality created and performed in the last decades of the twentieth century as the European Union (EU).

Bourdieu's positions against the EU have attracted much attention among scholars and commentators, and political actors as well. However, Bourdieu's relation with Europe cannot be reduced to his cries and attacks against Brussels, the EU rules, its institutional powers and its economic policies. Europe is much more than its current political embodiment as the EU. Indeed, we could say that in order to fully appreciate his cries and criticisms against the EU we have to investigate Bourdieu's idea of Europe and his life in Europe as both a scholar and an educated man. We could even say that this investigation is a condition for a full understanding of Bourdieu's social theory, as Europe has provided not only a material location for his intellectual work as a writer and a teacher – after all, France is in Europe, and Paris one of the historical capitals of Europe as a cultural entity – but also a strong reference point and a research object.

Bourdieu was clearly a European thinker: a French sociologist and intellectual who had a strong sense of France's embeddedness in a larger space that included not only French colonial possessions in Northern Africa – the first place where he did social research as a young social ethnographer working in a colonial region – but also all the countries sharing with France the common cultural heritage of ancient Greece, Latin Rome, Christianity (Reform included) and the birth of modernity (in the economic, political, intellectual and aesthetic fields). In this sense, Bourdieu has never ceased to be an intellectual of the “old Europe” – his intellectual genealogy being rooted in classics of Western (read European) thought as Aristotle, St. Thomas, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and so on.