![]() ![]() ![]() I am interested in this idea for some reasons related to my scholarship, but lately I have been thinking about it in connection with my teaching. This is the “new class” line of thought which I wrote about a little in my last post: the idea that “knowledge workers” or a cultural/technical/professional/creative elite have, over the course of the twentieth century, used their privileged positions in political, economic, academic, and cultural institutions to insulate themselves from both pressure from below and control from above, leaving them free to influence society according to their internal values and mores without being accountable either to their audiences or their economic superiors. ![]() Its many mendacities are both so petty and so bold that it’s not worth taking the time to critique, but the book’s constant paranoia about cultural elitism (or just plain snobbery) as the glue uniting a ruling class of intellectual mavens is illustrative of a broader tendency of thought that does deserve attention. I recently read Fred Siegel’s The Revolt against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (2015), a self-inflicted fate which should excuse anyone else of ever having to read it. ![]()
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