The intelligentsia as a social stratum - despite of the fact that, generally speaking, is doing quite well within the new system - begins nevertheless to differentiate and disintegrate on a more and more larger scale. Ordinary white-collar workers are subject to a pauperization and only hardly are able to adapt themselves to new conditions. Another and quite big part of the intelligentsia is successfully transforming into a „knowledge class” which is typical for Western countries; they are professional and market oriented people equipped with their knowledge but they lose in the same time a sense o f community; they are divided into pragmatically oriented groups of professionals and become an assemblage of highly qualified experts and specialists with higher schools certificates. However the role of intelligentsia as an elite which is supposed to be a source of patterns, the carriers of national culture as well as moral leaders is constantly subject to being weakened and depreciated. It seems however that Polish intelligentsia does assume and still is able to assume its two fundamental social functions even in new situation. In the ethos of the intelligentsia in Poland an immense role has always been played by the need of liberty, individualism, sense of innovations and responsibility. In its modem version this ethos is likely to have two basic versions, as it seems. The one - oriented at individual success, effectiveness and modernization - is being confessed by representatives of the growing group of market oriented professionals. This group shall be dominating numerously. The second form of the ethos is realized, and it should continue to be so still in the future - by an intelligentsia of classically educated kind, i.e. humanistic (as well ordinary white-collar workers as more market oriented), which maintains national cultural tradition but which in the same time is open minded and is facing the whole world and looking after common elements and differences between Polish national culture and other cultures in order to diminish some tensions occurring and facilitate this way mutually profitable contacts of Poland with the world.