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At the core of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory lies the notion of “social space” embodied in a representation given in the 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement Taste entitled “The space of social positions” and “The space of life-styles”. Although this “social space” is theoretical it is nonetheless linked with factorial representations that are believed to have been produced elsewhere and with two factorial spaces deriving from La Distinction’s own findings. This paper conducts four kinds of critiques of the establishment of this kind of representation of society and of the interpretation made of cultural practices on the scientific, theoretical, methodological and empirical grounds. It examines the putative factorial character of “the social space” and the identification of factor analysis as related to “a social space”. The article then considers the social and cultural representativeness of specific studies featured in La Distinction. It reconsiders the structural interpretation of the factorial analysis of “dominant” and “petit-bourgeois” tastes which omits the central variable of age and wrongly characterizes the horizontal axis of “structure”. To conclude, the article offers a historical and cognitive reinterpretation of French cultural tastes in the sixties.