Special radical classes of near-rings are denned and investigated. It is shown that our approach, which differs from previous ones, does cater for all the well-known radicals of near-rings. Moreover, most of the desirable properties from their ring theory counterpart are retained. The relationship between the special radical of a near-ring and the corresponding matrix near-ring is given. Special radicals in the variety of rings is a specialization of the supernilpotent radicals of rings. The need for supernilpotent radicals arose to discard some pathological radicals. Supernilpotent radicals are hereditary and contain all the nilpotent rings. These two properties (or sometimes just the second) are the denning conditions for a supernilpotent radical in the variety of nearrings. Unfortunately this approach lacks several desirable conclusions, for example, supernilpotent radicals need not have hereditary semisimple classes in the variety of near-rings (cf. [4]). At first it appeared that this is the price to pay for considering supernilpotent radicals in this more general variety. However, recent results seem to indicate that the starting point may not be the correct one. In [17], overnilpotent radical classes of near-rings were denned which also generalize the supernilpotent radicals of rings. The starting point here is via weakly special classes which are classes of quasi semi-equiprime near-rings (denned below). This approach has several advantages; the overnilpotent radicals are always ideal-hereditary. A host of