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In this inaugural lecture delivered upon his entry into the Collège de France in 1982, Pierre Bourdieu presented a kind of meta-lesson in which he defined his conception of sociology: not as a descriptive science of society, but as an inquiry into the "symbolic violence" through which an attempt is made "to impose the partial truth of one group as the truth of the objective relations between groups." Bourdieu pays homage to Marx and Foucault, and establishes the figure of the sociologist as a kind of guardian of symbolic capital—one who remains ever-vigilant against the deceptions that established culture will always seek to impose.