ABSTRACT
Like the French nobility of the eighteenth century described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the American upper class, during the latter half of the twentieth, and into the twenty-first centuries has become less a ruling aristocracy, and more and more a caste. E. Digby Baltzell follows Tocqueville, who showed, in The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution, that when new men of talent, wealth, and power were refused membership in the French aristocracy by noblemen who drew a caste line, class authority failed and set the stage for the French Revolution. Social classes as well as power and authority violate the egalitarian values at the core of modern American culture while at the same time being indispensable to democracy's survival. The idea in Baltzell's work that evokes his emotional involvement more than any other is that "Americans have been trained to succeed rather than to lead". Methodological ingenuity and theoretical perspective are hallmarks of Baltzell's work.
