We live submerged in politics, bombarded by national or international news that, faithful to the coup, juxtapose wars, elections, economic crisis, blood crimes. In this framework, journalists, media intellectuals and various essayists, instead of shedding light on the public debate, they introduce common places, if not errors or distortions. On the other hand, the scientism of some researchers inhibits them from dealing with the social world for fear of academic discredit. Apart from these impoverishing options, Political Interventions shows the intellectual itinerary Pierre Bourdieu and his way of understanding and practicing sociology, as a knowledge that would not be worth an hour of effort if it did not contribute to analyzing the political and social problems banalized by television news.

Thus, with his rigorous and incisive style, Bourdieu asks himself over and over again about the role of intellectuals, journalists and researchers, who must contribute to civic vigilance without being carried away by the illusion of "understanding everything at once". It analyzes the function of the State, rejecting the alternative of liberalism and socialism, which reduce the complexity of the world to its economic dimension. It investigates the operation of the middle and higher education system, from the methods of teacher recruitment to the structure of careers, to unveil the mechanisms that make it a space for reproduction and legitimization of social inequalities. It explains how opinion polls operate and how researchers and politicians make them an authoritative argument, which must be discussed. It especially stops at the distance between society and the political world, increasingly closed in on itself.

Political Interventions is a fundamental book because it allows us to understand how social science and militancy can empower each other to generate truly responsible critical thinking, the result of collective intellectual work, as far removed from outrage or moral sympathy as from academic asepsis.