Today’s changed conditions for doing social theory have disturbed the original balance of trade between lay and expert social theorists. Were we to compare, say, the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, we would soon find two major differences in the circumstances affecting who think about social life and how they think. First, the number of people with ready access to a culture supportive of critical thinking has increased dramatically, especially after the hold of the European powers on their colonies came to a formal end, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s. Second, the people normally engaged in critical social thinking are no longer necessarily members of or identified with a dominant class of bourgeois intellectuals. Many of the new social theorists do not consider themselves bourgeois, and many are visibly not anything like the white, male advocates of European culture who wrote the first, best-known social theories. These two differences—one of number, one of kind—make social theory today an enterprise largely, but not entirely, different from that of the nineteenth century.