From the 70s on, the concept of cultural capital has helped the French Sociology of Education to acknowledge the fact that the legitimate forms of culture act as an unequally distributed money that gives access to many a privilege. Still, researchers were too busy criticizing official ideologies about School and bringing to light social inequalities in schooling to wonder which historical conditions differences between school trajectories may be interpreted as inequalities. The historical reflexivity leads to the awareness that inequality is indissociable from the collective belief in the legitimacy (high degree of collective desirability) of an object, knowledge or practice.
Inequalities; Differences; Collective beliefs; Legitimacy; Criticism