The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
properties of an educational and social system: It is necessary to bring the structural and operating properties an educational system owes to its essential function and to the external functions of its essential function into relation with the socially conditioned predispositions which the agents (transmitters or receivers - see pedagogical communications) owe to their class origin and class membership and to the position they occupy in the institution, in order to understand adequately the nature of the relationship between the educational system and the structure of class relations, and to bring to light - without falling into any metaphysics of the harmony of the spheres or providentialism of the best or the worst - correspondences, homologies or coincidences reducible, in the last analysis, to convergences of interest, ideological alliances and affinities between habitus. Even if it is not feasible to construct the interminable discourse which would undertake, in each case, to run through the complete network of the relations which give each relation its complete meaning, it is sufficient to grasp, with respect to a particular relation, the system of circular relations which unite structures and practices, through the mediation of habitus, qua products of the structures, producers of practices and reproducers of the structures, in order to define the limits of validity (i.e., the validity within those limits) of an abstract expression such as (by way of definition) 'the system of relations between the educational system and the societal structure of class relations'. Insofar as it defines the primordial conditions of production of the differences between habitus, the structure of class relations, regarded as a field of forces [QUFD?] which expresses itself both in directly economic and political antagonisms and in a system of symbolic positions and oppositions [QUFD again?], supplies the explanatory principle of the systematic characteristics which the practice of the agents of a determinate class takes on in the different areas of activity, even if that practice owes its specific form, in each case, to the laws proper to each of the sub-systems considered. Thus, if it is not seen that the relationship between the various sub-systems is established only through the mediation of class membership, i.e., through the actions of agents disposed to actualize the same basic types of habitus in the most diverse practices (fertility, marriage, economic, political or educational conduct), one is in danger of reifying abstract structures by reducing the relationship between these sub-systems to the logical formula enabling any one of them to be derived from any other; or worse, one is in danger of reconstituting the appearances of the real functioning of the 'social system', only by giving the sub-systems the anthropomorphic shape of agents linked to one another by exchanges of services and so contributing to the smooth functioning of a system which is nothing other than the product of their abstract compounding (or so one mistakenly might surmise).