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WILL TRY to establish two things: first the continuing use but outdated nature of the model of working-class culture found in Distinction; second, the relationship between that model and the work which is reported in The Weight of the World. 1 I hope it need not be said that critique is the most serious form of high regard. Remnants of NecessitarianismThe empirical work upon which Distinction was based is now more than 20 years old. Characterizations of the working class in terms of their unreflexive 'choice of the necessary', and of the cultured upper class as unreflexive in their beliefs in the timeless and asocial qualities of truth, beauty and progress, of which they are guardians, however, remain with us. They are no longer to be found so clearly in Bourdieu's later work. He called upon intellectuals (despite their cosmopolitan privileges underlined in the hidden contrapuntalism of The Weight of the World) to take a stand against the false unanimity of dominant discourse, to swap the illusio of autonomous aesthetics for the (much-to-be-preferred, and self-admittedly normative) illusio of Realpolitik and the preservation of the values and achievements of the cultural and scientific fields (Bourdieu, 1992(Bourdieu, : 348, 1998. It is also the case that he developed confidence in the possibility of reflexive awareness, not only for intellectuals but also for the seriously disadvantaged. Speaking of the sociological enlightenment of those formerly characterized in terms of their necessitarianism, he later said, 'you may be upset by what you are, but you have instruments to understand and to accept it and that is the main problem of life ' (cited in Swain, 2000). Just as it was 20 years ago when Bourdieu, in practice, accepted the condition of the working class but launched a critique of the illusio of the aristocracy of culture, so it was at the beginning of the 21st century with his calling for

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