The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
sociological inquiry into the 'hidden functions' (of education and the social order): Few institutions are so well protected as the educational system against sociological inquiry. If it is true that the School has the function of hiding the external functions of its essential function and that to perform this ideological function it has to hide the fact that it performs it, then scientific sociology must, in this case, in order to find its object, take as its object that which stands in the way of the construction of the object. To refuse such a project is to consign oneself to blind or complicitous adherence to the given as it gives itself, whether this theoretical surrender be masked under the flaunted rigour of empirical procedures or legitimated by invocation of the ideal of "ethical neutrality", a mere non-aggression pact with the established order. If there is no science but of the hidden, then the science of society is, per se, critical, without the scientist who chooses science ever having to choose to make a critique: the hidden is, in this case, a secret, and a well-kept one, even when no one is commissioned to keep it, because it contributes to the reproduction of a 'social order' based on concealment of the most efficacious mechanisms of its reproduction and thereby serves the interests of those who have a vested interest in the conservation of that order.