For Bourdieu, habitus describes how past social experience operates as embodied dispositions of perception and action. People do not decide how to judge every situation by calculating explicit rules. Learned postures, tastes, expectations, and practical intuitions shape what appears possible or appropriate.
These dispositions are not merely private psychology. Family, education, class conditions, and occupational experience produce different practical orientations. Habitus is not a passive copy of social structure either: it generates practices in changing circumstances while bearing historical limits.
Read with the concept of field, habitus helps explain why similar skills receive different valuations in different settings. A manner of speaking that appears effortless in one educational setting may appear inappropriate elsewhere. This is not a mechanical law predicting identical conduct by every group member.
Habitus means neither fate nor unconscious repetition alone. Mismatches between dispositions and new conditions can generate hesitation, change, and reflexivity. Its value lies in investigating how individual choice and social necessity are joined in practice.
Aristotle’s hexis discusses virtue as a settled disposition rather than a transient feeling or mere capacity. This historical proximity does not establish identity with Bourdieu’s concept. Hexis concerns ethical character, while habitus investigates social history in practice within a different framework.