Journal of Statistical Physics, Vol. 55, Nos. 5/6, 1989. p. 1293-1302.
It is argued that the up to now only existing expression for the microscopic stress tensor in the presence of many-body interactions, while being formally acceptable, displays some physical shortcomings. These unpleasant features are remedied by explicitly constructing and symmetrizing a new stress tensor field. With the help of this construction, some recent results on the appearance of extremely long-ranged correlations involving the stress tensor field in systems with spontaneously broken symmetries are generalized.