The following obituary circulated on the Internet:

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential French intellectuals and political activists of recent decades, died of cancer in Paris, Jan. 24, at the age of seventy one. The French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, when he learned of his death, called Bourdieu "a great figure in the intellectual life of our country" and a man "who lived personally the dialectic of thought and action."

Bourdieu began to take a prominent role in French life with the 1964 publication of Les Heritiers: Les etudiants et la culture, which critiqued the privilege of university education. That year he moved to Paris to become research director at the School of Advanced Study in Social Science, a post he held until 1980. His passion for research led him to study Marx, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl, and he remained connected to the structuralism of the 1960s, out of which grew his preoccupation with language as well as his ethnographic methods. His experience as a teacher carried him into reflections on the educational system, which he turned into works such as La Reproduction, Lês Regles de Lárt, Noblese d´etat, and La Distinction, where he analyzed the cultural mechanisms of social differentiation, going beyond the purely economic aspects of class differences.

During the past ten years, he took a leading role in the anti-globalization movement, and he affirmed the rise of an era of growing inequality: “Under primitive capitalism there were limits, there were strikes against capital, etc. Now, capitalism is without limits; forms of ownership are introduced that were previously unimaginable. It follows the logic of unlimited profit. This is very dangerous; it can lead into barbarism.”

In his role as a political activist, one of his most widely recognized books was La Misere du Monde, in 1993, which denounced social suffering, and in 1996 he founded Líber Raisons d´Agir, which published books that questioned liberalism.