Ten years after the death of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we seem a long way from the days when he severely criticised the world of politics and the media. Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Bourdieu is also the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault, but ahead of Jacques Derrida, according to the ranking produced by Thomson Reuters (previously the Institute of Scientific Information), which counts citations. "Bourdieu has become the name of a collective research undertaking which disregards borders between disciplines and countries," says Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley.

A dream come true, for Bourdieu wanted to set up a "collective intellectual" based on scientific work done as a team sport. "The work of a researcher remains, when it is disseminated and becomes a sort of reflex response," says historian Gérard Noiriel. This is indeed the case for Bourdieu. But "references should not be confused with reverence", Noiriel cautions. "If a line of reasoning is debated, it must be open to question," says fellow historian Christophe Charle.

The sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron, co-author of his first major publications, still considers Bourdieu as a friend, despite their divergence at the beginning of the 1970s. He emphasises the essential contribution of his thinking "Ultimately 'with Bourdieu, against Pierre Bourdieu' does seem to define quite well the influence he had on me, much as on any reader or student who came into contact with his sociological imagination, [which was] an extraordinarily fertile source of hypotheses, concepts and schemas, almost all of which could be reused in the service of empirically relevant theories". But Passeron adds: "They were also likely, particularly due to the force of his most ambitious concepts, to encourage novices to indulge in sterile, mechanical imitation."

Luc Boltanski, a disciple who has distanced himself from his master, was determined not to blindly reproduce the same theory. Much the same is true of Bernard Lahire, who has focused in particular on "the invention of illiteracy". But what is left of his sociology of education, which influenced generations of teachers? After dropping off the radar in the 1980-90s, his ideas are making a comeback, according to Bertrand Geay. "In the past five or six years a new generation of PhD students has started looking at policies to open up the intake of [hothouse] classes préparatoires, at handicaps and over-achievers, and the making of syllabuses," he explains.

But Bourdieu's legacy reaches far beyond education. For one thing his scientific contribution still irrigates many branches of social science. Bourdieusian categories exert increasing influence in the sociology of intellectuals and writers, witness the work of Charle or the sociologist Gisèle Sapiro. His mark is apparent in the application of sociological analysis to justice, to working-class neighbourhoods and youth (Stéphane Beaud, Gérard Mauger), to elites (Michel and Monique Pinçon-Charlot), the family (Rémi Lenoir), and of course the media, the focus of his last publications.

Indeed it is here that Bourdieu's followers have displayed the greatest political commitment and bite. Satirical papers (PLPL or Plan B), non-profits (Acrimed) and films, in particular those directed by Pierre Carle, have broadcast his criticism, bringing it to a larger audience. The recent general release [in France] of Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde, a film by Gilles Balbastre and Yannick Kergoat, based on the eponymous book by Serge Halimi, is a further instance of this legacy.

At the same time Bourdieu's work has put down roots in other fields including political science and history, thanks to exchanges with historians such as Roger Chartier and the Enlightenment specialist Daniel Roche, with whom he worked at the Collège de France. Many of his expressions have entered everyday language – champ (field), reproduction, domination – making commonplace concepts once the subject of theoretical debate and giving an opus more often celebrated than really read the rigidity of dogma. "I sometimes have the impression that criticism has targeted a Bourdieu who never actually existed," says historian and political scientist Frédérique Matonti. "Often criticism seems to correspond to the way that Bourdieu has been taught, rather than to ideas in his work itself, which are remarkably malleable, never set firm, but constantly reworked."

Among the reasons cited to explain Bourdieu's "return" or "topicality", some highlight his influence on philosophy. While emphasising the importance of his empirical observations, Marie-Anne Lescourret, who published a biography in 2008, points out that some of the notions he used originated in philosophy. This is true of the concept of habitus (dispositions acquired in the course of our education) and the "symbolic forms" – violence, power, capital – which he borrowed from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who was driven into exile by the Nazis. Bourdieu had his work translated into French and published.

"It's as if there was something wrong with being a sociologist!" Matonti says. "On account of his initial training there certainly is an essential discussion with German philosophy, witness his book The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, a text that could only have been written, or read, by someone with a firm grasp of philosophy. It was also a question of generation: at that time people reasoned for or against phenomenology, for or against Sartre."

Although one of his last books was called Pascalian Meditations, it seems plausible that the key thinker for Bourdieu was not so much Pascal as Spinoza, who has since become a global icon for the radical intellectual left. What impressed the sociologist was the apparently contradictory notion that liberty does not mean casting off our deterministic chains, but rather understanding them.

But according to Passeron the neutral stance specific to scholars was totally foreign to Bourdieu, even if he did on occasion lay claim to that prerogative: "People who were even vaguely familiar with Bourdieu know he was capable of suffering intensely because of the hardness of the human condition, the arrogance or hypocrisy of social domination. "

The unresolved contradiction between commitment and scientific detachment still weighs on anyone reading or interpreting his work.

Could another Bourdieu appear now? Certainly not, says Noiriel: "No single thinker could exert so much influence. Sociological research has gone global, whereas it was only just taking shape in France when Bourdieu established his position."

But does the same apply to the position of a critical intellectual which he embodied, we ask? "Many more people now adopt that stance, but I am still attached to the position he defended as a specialist intellectual, following on from Foucault [...] primarily concerned with mobilising his learning, gained in a particular field of research, without becoming involved in all sorts of other topics."

"Bourdieu rarely spoke out on issues with which he was not familiar," says the sociologist Franck Poupeau, who edited his Political Interventions. From social deprivation to industrial action, his commitment was linked to "a profound understanding of these issues". So, he believes, "another Bourdieu would be possible now, but he would take a different form, that's all."

Bourdieu himself defined sociology as orchestration without a conductor. That orchestra is still playing.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde.