ABSTRACT
The New Class of intellectuals and intelligentsia are the relatively more educated counterpart—often the brothers, sisters, or children—of the old moneyed class. The early historical evolution of the New Class in Western Europe, its emergence into the public sphere as structurally differentiated and autonomous social stratum, may be defined in terms of certain critical episodes. The special privileges and powers of the New Class are grounded in their individual control of special cultures, languages, techniques, and of the skills resulting from these. The New Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of a historically and collectively produced cultural capital. The New Class's special speech variant stresses the importance of particular modes of justification rather than diffuse precedents or tacit features of the speech context. The New Class is a center of opposition to almost all forms of censorship, thus embodying a universal societal interest in a kind of rationality broader than that invested in technology.
