Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, this article aims to interpret and analyze the cultural production of Kemalpaşazâde Said Bey on the basis of his treatise Usûl-i Maişet-i İnsan. Said Bey was one of the most influential intellectual-bureaucrat figures of the Sublime Porte as well as the field of academy and the Ottoman press in the late XIXth and early XXth centuries. He was appointed to high bureaucratic posts such as the chairmanship of the Council of State; he gave lectures at the Mekteb-i Sultani, Mekteb-i Mülkiye and Mekteb-i Hukuk; he published newspapers; he wrote books on economics, law, ethnography, sociology, language and biography as the products of his cultural capital. He gained significant bureaucratic status, but he was recognized in the press and education fields much more than the bureaucratic field. Furthermore, in his life time and after, Said Bey was regarded as a cultural icon among Ottoman intelligentsia. In addition to the works he wrote, his polemics with other dominant actors of the fairly matured Ottoman literary field were very effective in transforming his cultural capital into symbolic capital and his acknowledgement as a cultural icon.