Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.

However Bourdieu critically diverged from Durkheim in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting through the embodiment of social structures symbolic orders. In 1996 he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California Berkeley and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Bourdieu died of cancer at the age of 71.

A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations. Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural social and symbolic capital and the concepts of habitus field or location and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein Maurice Merleau-Ponty Edmund Husserl Georges Canguilhem Karl Marx Gaston Bachelard Max Weber Émile Durkheim Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss.