Alienated Elites

The New Class and Its Discontents

Anti-Vietnam protest, 1968. Bettmann Archive. Image: Comparative and Historical Sociology, Section of the American Sociological Association.

In the early to mid-1970s, a group of American and European social critics began to write about what they saw as the increasingly large social and cultural imprint of a “New Class” of credentialed experts. The new class, according to these writers, consisted of “a large part of academia, the bureaucracy, the media, and related occupations and institutions.” Members of this new class were either highly educated or in the process of completing academic qualifications. Moreover, the new class had its own particular “values and sensibilities.” Initially cultivated by the vanguard elements of the new class, these values were, new class theorists believed, gradually percolating into other, less elite sectors—business schools and colleges of education, state and corporate bureaucracies, the clergy, public relations and the advertising industry, and the trade unions.¹

The term “new class” was not in itself a new one. It was coined by Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 to describe what he saw as the huge technocratic overclass that would be required to administer the Marxian version of socialism. The immense concentrations of state power and responsibility implied in Marx’s vision would, Bakunin predicted,

demand … immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” … It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!²

The term had also surfaced more recently in the title of the Yugoslavian dissident politician Milovan Đilas’s widely read insider critique of Eastern European communism and the apparatchik system, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (1957).³ There was, then, a certain undeniable Cold War logic at work when post-1968 conservative social critics took up this loaded term and applied it in their own work. It came with its own rich web of anti-communist associations. However, the conservative new-class critique was not aimed solely (or even primarily) at Cold War geopolitical adversaries. It was an attempt to turn the critique inward, to both expose and explain what neoconservatives and liberal critics of the New Left saw as a burgeoning “adversary culture” among the radicalised cadres of the domestic “new class.”

Despite being in many cases the products of prestigious institutions, the members of the American “new class” had nevertheless, according to these critics, developed a troubling and “virulent hostility” towards the institutions and systems that had shaped them, or indeed anything resembling traditional values.⁴ In a 1975 essay, Irving Kristol attempted to define what he saw as the aspirations and worldview underpinning this adversarial culture. Taking inspiration from the communist-leaning European Left, the American new class had been initially small and unabashedly elitist. After having its numbers swollen by the unprecedented expansion of higher education in the post-Sputnik years, it inculcated these new entrants into its radical system of values. Going well beyond the boundaries of the old American “progressive reform” platform (although continuing, with varying degrees of disingenuousness, to employ its language), this new class was, Kristol suggested, “acting upon a hidden agenda.” What it really sought to do (under the guise of forward-looking “idealism” and “progressivism”) was to thoroughly remake the existing system of American welfare capitalism along “anti-capitalist” lines.

For Kristol, admiration for events in Maoist China among the intellectual elements of the American new class gave them away. If given full rein, the new class would bring the “total collectivization of life” and the “total destruction of liberty” visible in communist states to American shores.⁵ Short of that, new class adherents sought to use convenient “externalities,” such as pollution and public health and safety, as pretexts for expanding the portion of the economy that fell under its control. In this way, the new class could, in opportunistic and ever-expanding fashion, unleash its “expertise and skills” upon the public—a slow-motion, bureaucratically achieved version of cultural revolution.⁶ Writing four years later, Kristol’s neoconservative counterpart, the Georgetown political scientist and future Reagan cabinet member, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, seconded his account. “The political temptation of the new class,” she wrote, “lies in believing that their intelligence and exemplary motives equip them to reorder the institutions, the lives, and even the characters of almost everyone.” This, she wrote, was “the totalitarian temptation,” and the reason that any freedom-loving nation should carefully restrict the power and influence of intellectuals within their realms.⁷

The West German sociologist Helmut Schelsky advanced perhaps the most vivid and conspiratorial version of this account of the new class. In a 1974 book (published in German) and a short article summarizing its argument (published in English), Schelsky described what he saw as an attempted takeover of state apparatuses in the West by a new “priesthood”—essentially, an aspirant new ruling class. This priesthood consisted of left-wing radicals, disaffected intellectuals, and their allies in the institutions, unions, and political parties, backed by the tacit support of liberals coerced into taking sides by the apparent moral gravity of the moment. Schelsky’s “priesthood” weaponized the norms and instruments of the state against itself in order to facilitate state capture. Firstly, it sought control of the meaning-making and reality-defining parts of the state—the media, the bureaucracy, and the education system. This reflected the fact that “reality” in the modern world was almost entirely constructed from “paper, sound and picture.” Those who controlled education, as well as media production and distribution, possessed ownership over the “interpretation of events” and thus became the “dominant class” in society.

Once the means of social and cultural “interpretation” were under its monopoly control, the new class could distract the population with a constant stream of abstract, politicized “ethical convictions” and moral sloganeering—information-based simulacra that would cause citizens to lose sight of the “real world.”⁸ Second, the “new priesthood” sought to delegitimise the state by issuing an ever-escalating set of demands for identity recognition and material redistribution—free public transport; a 36-hour working week; “study leave” for all citizens—that the state apparatus could not possibly hope to meet.⁹ Via repeated and humiliating failure, traditional state representatives would find themselves “fundamentally discredited” and “deprived of self-confidence,” enabling the eventual establishment of “a system of social supremacy over the workers under a new ruling class” of symbol manipulators.¹⁰ This ruling new-class elite would be the equivalent, Schelsky implies, of the classic Party apparatuses of the Soviet system, only operating within Western institutions and employing the techniques of the (formerly capitalist) mass media to manipulate the working classes into acquiescence.

The various spectres of the 1960s and early 1970s—a resurgent New Left; urban riots and student protests; as well as the emergence of a global counterculture that resisted formerly dominant norms, burgeoning new social and group identity movements and ethical cultures, and novel forms of consumerism—loom large over these accounts.¹¹ What new class theorists writing from the Right sought was an overarching causal explanation for why the late 1960s had produced such a conflagration of pre-existing values and why academics, intellectuals, and professionals had played such prominent roles in promoting the general tumult. A very personal and particular sense of alienation also underlies much of this writing. Liberals and former leftists who adopted neoconservative positions during the 1970s were especially dismayed by the unexpected resurgence of supposedly discredited hard-line Marxist and utopian ideologies. Proponents of the “militant liberalism” that was ascendant in the institutions of the West in the 1950s and early 1960s had confidently declared “the end of ideology.” Now these supposedly dead ideologies were surging back within the very institutions of higher learning that had expanded to meet the Communist challenge.¹²

The case of Schelsky illustrates how personal campus experiences could feed into the production of the more paranoid variants of new class theory. A rehabilitated former SA and Nazi Party member and eastern front infantry veteran, Schelsky worked for the Red Cross and UNESCO after the Second World War and, in his academic work, engaged closely with developments in post-war American sociology.¹³ However, by the early 1970s, repeated clashes with members of the German New Left on his own campus had thoroughly alienated him from his own discipline.¹⁴ In his later work, he writes darkly about “politically engaged radical young sociologists” who sought to “discredit” the legal profession and judiciary—and thus the rule of law—via the application of debilitating doses of critical theory.¹⁵ Schelsky’s febrile portrait of a radical left poised to unleash totalitarianism, then, arguably involves more than a hint of projection—the return (in psychologically threatening form) of aspects of his own repressed past. The communist-aligned left, according to Schelsky’s prediction, would bring about the “total politicization of man,” using the education system to “penetrate the innermost being of each individual citizen” as he had himself advocated that the state do in his own disavowed wartime Nazi writings on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.¹⁶

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As Christopher Lasch was later to point out, the deployment of New Class theory by neoconservatives and former leftists not only enabled them to come to terms psychologically with the challenges and (as they saw it) betrayals of the New Left. It also provided a key intellectual foundation for the New Right that was to achieve political ascendancy in the West with the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions. What the spectre of the “new class” enabled these writers to do, Lasch observed, was to be seen to “attack ‘elites’ without attacking big business.”¹⁷ The economic, social, and cultural malaise of the 1970s could be (via a strategically myopic focus on the culpability of the new class) represented as a long hangover from the excesses of 1968. It stemmed, in other words, from the manipulation of naive college kids by an alienated and frustrated academic elite who were themselves cossetted within institutions that had not yet been exposed to the full disciplinary effects of the market. Forcing the institutions of higher learning to be “accountable,” breaking the power of the big unions, and (via the creation of new competitive markets) making the bottom line the final arbiter of value would take care once and for all of the intellectuals and their utopian ideas for transformative social change. Or so the New Right believed.

Successful as it was in the short term, however, the New Right’s solution to the problem of new-class power proved inadequate. In simply equating the new class with an atavistic totalitarianism, the New Right's critique could not come to terms with the new forms of “new class radicalism” and alienation that were to emerge from the corporatised university and which were then to enter media and business cultures “from the left.” It would turn out that the “adversary culture” and the market were by no means as opposed to each other as the more complacent neoconservatives assumed. Rather than enforcing a new consensus of “market rationality,” neoliberalism and the digital attention economy could be forcing agents for new forms of radicalising discourse and meaning-making. The burgeoning new bureaucracies that grew to meet the dictates of neoliberal audit culture in both public and private sectors became fertile breeding grounds for new versions of the “adversary culture.” A market society operating according to the logics of consumer culture and the fashion cycle, it turns out, was capable of producing novel discursive and ideological formations across the political spectrum.¹⁸ Just as the New Left represented (for conservatives and portions of the non-Marxist left) a kind of nightmare return of Marxian revolutionary politics and utopian ideology, the radical and destabilizing discourse cultures fostered by communicative capitalism were to contribute to a synthesis that few on the Right seem to have anticipated: the spectre of “woke capital.”¹⁹

1. B. Bruce-Briggs, “An Introduction to the Idea of the New Class,” in The New Class?, edited by B. Bruce-Briggs (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 5–6.

2. Mikhail Bakunin, “On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx,” in Bakunin on Anarchism, edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 319.

3. Milovan Đilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957).

4. Norman Podhoretz, “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in The New Class?, edited by B. Bruce-Briggs, p. 19.

5. Irving Kristol, “On Corporate Capitalism in America,” The Public Interest, 41 (1975), p. 135.

6. Kristol, “On Corporate Capitalism in America,” pp. 136–7.

7. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Politics and the New Class,” Society, 35 (1998), p. 220. This essay was originally published in 1979.

8. Helmut Schelsky, “The New Strategy of Revolution: The ‘Long March’ through the Institutions,” Modern Age, 18:4 (1974), pp. 347–8.

9. Schelsky, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” p. 352.

10. Schelsky, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” pp. 351; 357.

11. Bruce-Briggs, “Introduction to the Idea of the New Class,” p. 6.

12. Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony, 1945–1955 (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 190.

13. James Chappel, “Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany,” Contemporary European History, 26:1 (2017), pp. 97–100.

14. Carl-Göran Heidegren, “Transcendental Theory of Society, Anthropology and the Sociology of Law: Helmut Schelsky: An Almost Forgotten Sociologist,” Acta Sociologica, 40:3 (1997), pp. 280–1.

15. Schelsky, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” p. 351.

16. Chappel, “Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age,” 98.

17. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 511.

18. Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 36-38; 62-69.

19. See Darel E. Paul, “The Puzzle of Woke Capital,” American Affairs, 6:3 (2022), pp. 130-49.