ABSTRACT
Following its independence from France, in 1962, Algeria’s society was characterized by a low level of economic, social and cultural dierentiation. As a result, how the social space would be restructured, and which system of values the new structure would be based on, remained open questions. As a result of over a century of levelling down by the colonial system, the social structure, in which the social space is constituted of agents holding dierent types of capital (economic, academic), needed to be rebuilt. In the absence of other forms of capital, access to education and to scholastic knowledge imposed itself as the constitutive element of this value system and the only legitimate factor of social dierentiation.
