The Problem of the "New Elite"

St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Image: Wikimedia Commons

“Elite” is one of the most contested keywords of our current epoch. A “keyword,” as Raymond Williams defines it, is a piece of vocabulary that, due to a complex history or sudden shifts in meaning over time, raises problems and difficulties every time it is used. A keyword can have positive associations (or a transparently obvious meaning) for one group of language users, while another simultaneously hears in it a cliche, a muddled abstraction, a threat, or an insult.¹ Williams’ own definition of “elite” in Keywords demonstrates the scope of the problem. Like many keywords, “elite” contains a number of simultaneous meanings and associations piled on top of each other, each deriving from a different point in its history. Its modern meaning reflects the breakdown of traditional forms of political authority in the nineteenth century. The word “elite” became synonymous with the old forms of political power, which by then had started to totter, their sources of authority unclear and increasingly contested. Negative meanings began to shadow or crowd out positive associations. As a result, to be an “elite” is now not simply to be “eminent,” “in charge,” or “the best.” It is also (and simultaneously) to be “out of touch,” “outmoded,” “elitist,” or subject to inevitable replacement by new, aspirant elites coming up from below.²

When, in his new book, Values, Voice and Virtue, Matthew Goodwin writes that “the people who really run Britain and many other western democracies today” are members of “a new middle-class graduate elite” that represents “no more than one-quarter” of the nation, then, he is not merely stating facts.³ He is mobilising and appealing to a range of associations, beliefs, and media memories in the minds of his readers, each summoned into the foreground by the incantation of that single (key)word, “elite.” (In fact, Goodwin performs this incantation often in Values, Voice and Virtue. The word “elite” appears no fewer than 533 times in the book.) For some readers, the word will perhaps evoke “respectable” memories of previous works of socio-cultural critique, such as the early pages of Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites, with their portraits of professional-managerial elites becoming increasingly detached from the lives and concerns of their less privileged compatriots.⁴ For others, however, like the Sun readers who are informed by Goodwin that:

the New Elite demand things which signal their status to other elites, such as open borders, a relaxed approach to dealing with the small boats, or the sexualisation of children, which they will not have to suffer the effects of themselves⁵

the word “elite” may have another set of connotations entirely. As Sam Elliott’s Stranger remarks of the word “dude” in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski, this is a moniker that “no-one would self-apply” where he comes from.

The back and forth between Goodwin and his critics over the applicability of the term “new elite” represents a real discursive impasse. This amounts to more than the fact that, when a car is clearly going in the wrong direction (as most people, regardless of their personal politics, seem to believe the British state currently is), no one wants to admit to being in the driver’s seat. The term itself, “elite,” has become tainted and unproductive. In the tussle over terminology that has resulted, the wider issues that Goodwin’s argument initially seemed to have raised have effectively disappeared. What should have been the targets of Goodwin’s critique can easily evade it by focusing their responses on its rhetorical shortcuts and exaggerations, such as the assertion that it is the “new elite” that “really runs Britain” today. Worse, as Thomas Prosser points out, this simplistic framing “enables them to dismiss analysis/criticism of [this] sociocultural class as right-wing scaremongering.”

Values, Voice and Virtue simply doesn’t represent the “new elite” in terms it would itself recognise. In taking it as an undivided “overclass,” Goodwin overlooks the large inequalities in both generational and professional clout within the occupations grouped under the “new elite” heading.⁶ He also disregards the considerable economic stresses suffered by both institutions and individuals under austerity and in the long fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008. The fact that members of so many of the professions within Goodwin’s “new elite,” from academics to teachers, barristers, journalists, civil servants, and junior doctors, are currently taking industrial action indicates that many are profoundly unsatisfied with basic pay and conditions. Those on fixed-term or part-time contracts, in junior grades, and at lower salary levels, in particular, are highly exposed to the cost of living crisis, as well as longer-term sources of economic stress, such as rising rents, house prices, and interest rates; student debt; and the chronic overproduction of credentials under the current, marketised model of higher education. Many also feel profoundly disrespected and overlooked by a central government that appears to be in perpetual cost-cutting mode and has declared that “it has had enough of experts.”

We need another set of critical lenses for examining the problems of professional-managerial cultural and administrative power, ones that take into account the alienation, as well as the sense of powerlessness, precarity, and moral emergency, that are key components within the affective culture of the contemporary new class.

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In follow-up blog posts and podcast interviews, Goodwin acknowledges that his “argument builds upon the work of Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, David Brooks, Richard Florida, Michael Lind, Sir Roger Scruton and David Goodhart, among others.”⁷ However, it is another late twentieth-century critic who perhaps produced the most penetrating and prescient critique of the “new class” concept that Goodwin bases his “new elite” on. In his 1979 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, the renegade Marxist scholar Alvin Gouldner set out sixteen theses outlining the history and motivations of the new class, as well as the internal characteristics that led to its rise and success. In focusing only on intellectuals (those involved in “cultural production,” such as academics, advertising executives, arts professionals, and journalists) and the “technical intelligentsia” (such as research and computer scientists, managers, administrators, senior civil-service bureaucrats, architects, and planners), Gouldner’s was the most narrowly defined of the “new class” theories developed during the 1970s.⁸ Unlike Goodwin, Gouldner did not imply that the members of his new class were actually the ones in charge of things.⁹ However, he suggests, the new class had in-built features and advantages that would enable them to compete for those positions in the future.

What the members of Gouldner’s new class do, essentially, is to offer their unique expertise in exchange for salaries in government, businesses, and institutions.¹⁰ They are the technicians of systems, symbols, and language that make the administrative infrastructure of capitalism possible—although capitalists resent their reliance on them and the new class itself often holds capital in contempt. Adept at positioning themselves as gatekeepers and conduits, members of the new class identify as the guardians and protectors of the working classes and the marginalised. Nevertheless, Gouldner is clear that the new class has its own class interests in mind at all times. The radical-left politics professed by many of its members might manifest as a passionate rallying cry against inequality. However, the Gouldner theory holds, socialism is the “natural ideology” of the new class not because it would provide social justice for the working classes, but simply “because it eliminates the capitalist and places the intellectuals in complete command.”¹¹

Short of actual revolution, new-class penetration into people’s lives and workplaces has a similarly controlling and suffocating quality. The “new professionals” of the new class latch onto human emotions and relationships, positioning themselves as saviours, therapists, and social activists. They are adept at identifying new “social emergencies” in workplaces and institutions and championing policies and bureaucracies to “address” or “abolish” them (staffed, naturally, by new cadres of salaried new-class employees).¹² There is, as the sociologist David Ashley writes, a kind of “built-in imperialism” to this line of work. New layers of administration and workplace surveillance proliferate. These workplace initiatives, moreover, focus ever more minutely on terrain that used to be regarded as “personal” and off-limits, exposing employees’ conduct, beliefs, and inner lives to increasing levels of moral scrutiny.¹³ The moral causes championed by the new class (such as “diversity” and “inclusion”), as well as the social harms they campaign against (such as “hate” and “the climate emergency”), are often vaguely defined and open-ended, and can be endlessly re-invented to allow bureaucratic expansion or future initiatives to be put in place.

Members of the new class ultimately derive their authority, Gouldner argues, from their modes of speech and argument: specifically, what he defines as their deployment of the “culture of critical discourse” (or CCD). CCD is a mode of speaking and writing in which speakers must justify all the assertions they make, but by deploying evidence or reasoned forms of argument and not by simply referring to tradition or relying on personal authority:

good speech is speech that can make its own principles explicit and is oriented to conforming with them, rather than stressing context-sensitivity and context-variability. Good speech here thus has theoreticity.¹⁴

The triumph of CCD was, Gouldner suggests, part and parcel of capitalism’s successful assault on traditional, religiously grounded understandings of knowledge.¹⁵ What CCD does is to disqualify “all speech grounded in traditional societal authority, while it authorizes itself … as the standard of all serious speech.”¹⁶

CCD has several consequences for those who use it. Firstly, it necessitates a pose of impersonality, much like the journalistic “voice from nowhere.” It seems to rise above the individual speaker and resist embodiment in any particular person or point of view. This is the discursive realm of “trusting the science” and “the figures speak for themselves.” It may result in a form of technical jargon or rhetoric that is highly distinctive in itself, but which curiously renders all users of it seemingly indistinguishable from one another. Secondly, it encourages a sense of detachment from all local levels. CCD is above all international and cosmopolitan in scope. It is a transnational language shared by new-class adherents across national borders. Its modes of speech and self-understanding encourage members to distance themselves from “particularistic, history-bound places” or languages and the folk-understandings of families and local cultures.¹⁷ Similarly, it encourages a global or unified view of problems that lends itself easily to an affinity with “deep green,” ecological, or systems-based understandings of the world.¹⁸

The cosmopolitan and free-floating nature of CCD contributes to another characteristic of new-class identity: alienation. It fosters a deeply radicalising, critical orientation to both knowledge and politics. All truth claims, no matter how “authoritative,” fall under the remit and scrutiny of the CCD and its community of speech users. This has (at least initially) a profoundly levelling effect. The highest office-holder and the lowliest member of the CCD community are reduced to the same horizontal plane of argument and bound there by the same rules of discourse and evidence. However, CCD’s box of critical tools can give its users a sense of innate superiority over the objects of their critique:

CCD treats the relationship between those who speak it, and others about whom they speak, as a relationship between judges and judged. It implies that the established social hierarchy is only a semblance and that a deeper, more important distinction is between those who speak and understand truly and those who do not. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is to be emancipated at once from lowness in the conventional social hierarchy, and is thus a subversion of that hierarchy. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is a political act.¹⁹

The gulf between the intoxicating temporary power reversals that CCD can seem to confer and the often precarious material circumstances of the average CCD user, however, produces its own forms of alienation. Members of the new class can end up feel perpetually cheated and frustrated, as though the rewards and powers they feel entitled to are constantly slipping out of reach. Doubling down on rhetoric becomes its own form of denial—a way of disavowing the knowledge that wielding symbols and “devastating” opponents with language have a habit of never actually achieving any real-world effects.

This sense of frustration is magnified by the chronic global overproduction of symbolic analysts and PhD-holders by the universities. This was a phenomenon first visible in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s.²⁰ However, the global collapse of the academic job market (particularly in the humanities) after the financial crisis of 2008 has dwarfed any previous manifestation of this problem.²¹ As devastating as this is for the often debt-burdened and precariously employed junior members of the academic fraction within the new class, alienation and elite overproduction produce their own powerful feedback mechanisms. Institutions use the oversupply of credentialed labour to drive down wages and conditions, getting critique "on the cheap." Frustrated expectations, meanwhile, inflame existing radical tendencies within the new class. Rhetoric becomes divorced ever further from reality in a fetishistic insistence on the transformative powers of language. A deeply felt sense of the new class being oppressed victims themselves, meanwhile, reinvigorates the central mystification within the new class’s understanding of itself—that it exists to liberate oppressed groups and avenge victims everywhere, rather than to simply further its own class interests.

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In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, capitalism faced a huge legitimacy crisis.²² During the ensuing years of fiscal austerity, this crisis ramified in all directions, as cut-backs, underfunding, and shrinking markets compromised the missions of both publicly and privately funded institutions everywhere. The old narratives of improvement and uplift which the institutions relied on to carry out their business came to seem unsustainable. For many younger members of the new class, especially, an overwhelming sense of blockage, overproduction, and injustice—as well as a pervasive existential anxiety—have come to shape their dominant emotional repertoires. However, despite the new class’s traditional sense of its own powerlessness, these concerns and preoccupations have not been simply ignored.

In response to the environmental activism and race- and gender-based social justice movements of the early to mid-2010s, both the institutions and capitalism itself have come to decisively embrace the languages of environmental sustainability and anti-discrimination.²³ With the burgeoning growth of the DEI/EDI industries globally, many hundreds of thousands of new-class job opportunities have opened up. These industries have significantly reshaped the contours of the post-2008 organisation. New internal markets, administrative structures, and forms of auditing have been imposed on both businesses and public institutions, reflecting the accelerating corporate concern and awareness—and the concern to communicate that concern and awareness—with the issues of inclusivity, under-representation, and the “climate emergency.”²⁴

Although the discourses of workplace activism and institutional and corporate responsibility are by no means new, these concerns have lately attained a degree of cultural centrality not seen since the new-class radicalism of the 1970s.²⁵ In fact, we could see the new corporate sustainability and equality agendas as representing a new compact between the new class and capital, a phenomenon akin to the “welfare state compromise” of the post-Second World War period, albeit one focused heavily on the politics of symbolic recognition, rather than the redistribution of wealth or material goods.²⁶ As then, the compact provides benefits for both sides (although, in practice, only a subsection of the new class itself directly benefits). Sustainability, diversity, and inclusion open up vast new terrains for new-class professional intervention, all underwritten by the forms of auditing, metricisation, and managerial discourse production at which the new class excels. These new, ethically charged career pathways thus follow the pattern of “expertise brokerage” via market and institutional recognition that the new class has traditionally relied on for its existence. They hold out the promise of emotionally satisfying work for professionals who prefer to regard their labour in moral rather than material terms.

For businesses and institutions, meanwhile, colluding with the new class provides access to new “human resources”: the CCD-informed critical energies (and moral frustrations) of young, idealistic new-class employees, whose alienation and sense of generational injustice can be put to productive use in internal forms of organisational “creative destruction.” The “anti-policies” encouraged by the sustainability and social harm agendas provide ample scope for new forms of surveillance, internal discipline, and other kinds of workplace “continuous improvement.”²⁷ Material critiques and existential concerns can thus be reframed as moral issues and reified in new comms and bureaucratic procedures, the creation of which is often palmed off on starry-eyed young graduates eager to “make a difference” and see their institutions “centering the marginalised.” The metrics and audit trails resulting from the implementation of new anti-policies enable businesses and institutions to claim that they are “addressing” issues, “listening” to “concerns,” and generally “bending to the arc of history” in dialogue with “concerned stakeholders.”

The intense emotivism and evangelical tone these claims can generate, as well as the new ethical and moral workplace surveillance cultures they encourage, may produce their own forms of alienation among staff who “refuse to drink the Koolaid,” resulting in the production of “dissident” or “heterodox” professional-managerial class fractions. Indeed, much of “heterodox,” IDW (intellectual dark web), or what used to be called “post-left” Twitter could be interpreted as jaded or sceptical members of the PMC mouthing off with varying degrees of anonymity about the new ideological cultures in their workplaces and attempting to develop their own collective explanations for what has been happening.

However, a purely cynical interpretation of the new compact would be simplistic and reductive. Large businesses truly do want to connect with new markets and foster a sense of intense identification among their employees—one stemming from workers having their evolving ideals, worldviews, and identities “recognised” by their employers.²⁸ A sense of “leading” on sustainability, inclusion, or wellbeing, meanwhile, appeals to the messianic strain in corporate leadership culture, as well as opening up new forms of competition, corporate value, and benchmarking.²⁹ The compact fosters a degree of buy-in at all levels. This is why the Right’s complacent (and demonstrably inaccurate) phrase, “go woke, go broke,” is so ill-conceived. The absorption of new-class critique and idealism by businesses and institutions does not represent any kind of spanner in the works. Instead, it is a (so far highly) successful response to the legitimacy crisis, one that ultimately reforges critical energies into new products and services, new market mechanisms, and new rounds of organisational reforms.

An awareness of how the compact works reveals that both sides of the current debate in Britain over the existence or otherwise of the “new elite” are tilting at strawmen. The new class under the emerging compact is neither “really ruling” the nation, nor is it a powerless and put-upon victim of circumstances beyond its control. Instead, capital and entrepreneurial elements within the new class are working together in furtherance of their own material and professional interests. The challenge for both capital and the new class going forward is—how long can these critical energies be contained or redirected if “meaningful change” proves impossible to deliver? How far can this new compact be pushed before it reaches external as well as internal limits?

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd. edition (London: Fontana Press, 1988), pp. 15-16.

2. Williams, Keywords, pp. 113-15.

3. Matthew Goodwin, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics (London: Penguin, 2023), p. 10.

4. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 28-9.

5. Matthew Goodwin, “How Britain Is Being Run by a ‘New Elite’ of Radical Woke Middle-class Liberals Completely out of Step with the Public,” The Sun (28 March 2023).

6. For the “new elite” as an “overclass,” see Goodwin, Values, Voice and Virtue, pp. xviii; 15; 32; and 96.

7. Matthew Goodwin, “The New Elite Is in Complete Denial,” Spiked Online (12 April 2023).

8. Steven Brint, “‘New-Class’ and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals,” American Journal of Sociology, 90:1 (1984), pp. 35-6.

9. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 15.

10. David Ashley, History Without a Subject: The Postmodern Condition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 188-90.

11. John McGowan, “The Future of the Intellectuals: Was Alvin Gouldner Right?”, in The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 118.

12. For an account of this process of “moral bureaucratisation” in the context of the American university system, see Jack Simmons, “The Rebirth of Canonical Love,” in The Twenty-First Century and Its Discontents: How Changing Discourse Norms Are Changing Culture, edited by Jack Simmons (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), pp. 107-32.

13. Ashley, History Without a Subject, pp. 184-5; 201.

14. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, p. 28.

15. McGowan, “The Future of the Intellectuals,” p. 119.

16. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, p. 29.

17. See Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, p. 59; and Robyn Eckersley, “Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?”, Political Studies, 37:2 (1989), p. 209.

18. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, pp. 42-3.

19. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, p. 59.

20. See Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, p. 67-70.

21. For a discussion and some statistics, see Kevin Carey, “The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s,” New York Times (5 March 2020).

22. Carl Palmås & Nicholas Surber, “Legitimation Crisis in Contemporary Technoscientific Capitalism,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 15:3 (2022), pp. 373-79.

23. For a valuable and revealing discussion of current trends when they were still emergent, see Cliff Oswick and Mike Noon, “Discourses of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion: Trenchant Formulations or Transient Fashions?”, British Journal of Management, 25 (2014), pp. 23-39.

24. On investing trends in ESG, see “Buttonwood,” “The Tenacity of ESG,” The Economist (19 November 2022), p. 74. For a more sceptical read, see “The Saviour Complex,” The Economist (23 July 2022), pp. 5-7.

25. For the older discourses of corporate responsibility, see Rob Gray, Reza Kouhy, and Simon Lavers, “Corporate Social and Environmental Reporting: A Review of the Literature and a Longitudinal Study of UK Disclosure,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 8:2 (1995), pp. 47-77. On workplace activism, see Maureen Scully and Amy Segal, “Passion with an Umbrella: Grassroots Activists in the Workplace,” in Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, edited by M. Lounsbury and M. J. Ventresca (Bingley: Emerald, 2002), pp. 125-68.

26. Cf. McGowan, “The Future of the Intellectuals,” p. 121.

27. On the moral dimensions of “anti-policies,” see Tereza Østbø Kuldova, Compliance-Industrial Complex: The Operating System of a Pre-Crime Society (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 37-8.

28. See, for instance, Marjolein Dennissen, Yvonne Benschop, and Marieke van den Brink, “Diversity Networks: Networking for Equality?”, British Journal of Management, 30 (2019), pp. 966–80; and Grace Lordan and Teresa Almeida, “How Empathy and Competence Promote a Diverse Leadership Culture,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 63:4 (2022).

29. For an older, though still highly relevant, analysis of the quest for moral meaning in managerial culture, see Nicole Aubert, “Organizations as Existential Creations: Restoring Personal Meaning While Staying Competitive,” in In Search of Meaning: Managing for the Health of Our Organizations, Our Communities, and the Natural World, edited by Thierry C. Pauchant (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1995), pp. 151-72.