As a social critique of the judgements of taste,
Distinction (1979) proposes that people with much
cultural capital — education and intellect, style of speech and style of dress, etc. — participate in determining what distinct aesthetic values constitute
good taste within their society. Circumstantially, people with less cultural capital accept as natural and legitimate that ruling-class definition of
taste, the consequent distinctions between
high culture and
low culture, and their restrictions upon the social conversion of the types of
economic capital,
social capital, and
cultural capital. The
social inequality created by the limitations of their
habitus (mental attitudes, personal habits, and skills) renders people with little cultural capital the social inferiors of the ruling class. Because they lack the superior education (cultural knowledge) needed to describe, appreciate, and enjoy the
aesthetics of a work of art, 'working-class people expect objects to fulfil a function' as practical entertainment and mental diversion, whilst middle-class and upper-class people passively enjoy an ''objet d'art'' as a work of art, by way of
the gaze of aesthetic appreciation. The acceptance of socially dominant forms of taste is a type of
symbolic violence between social classes, made manifest in the
power differential that allows the ruling class to define, impose, and endorse norms of good taste upon all of society. Hence, the naturalization of the
distinction of taste and its misrepresentation as socially necessary, deny the dominated classes the cultural capital with which to define their own world. Moreover, despite the dominated classes producing their own definitions of
good taste and of
bad taste, "the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated aesthetic, which is constantly obliged to define itself in [the] terms of the dominant aesthetics" of the ruling class. ==Theory==