ABSTRACT
Digby Baltzell was an unusual kind of sociologist. Even before the 1960s, Digby documented the decline since 1940 of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class from aristocracy into caste, as the subtitle of The Protestant Establishment put it. The establishment had ceased, he argued, to recruit new members from below— its “genteel” anti-Semitism was his major evidence of this— and in retreating with self satisfaction into its own privileged enclaves it had abandoned the tradition of noblesse oblige that reflected its sense of accountability to the larger society. Howard Schneiderman, writing since the 1960s, sees Digby as arguing in favor of equality of opportunity against the complete egalitarianism of full equality of condition apparently affirmed by New Left marxisant radicals. Both in his earlier and more saliently in his post-60s work, Digby clearly opposed in classical conservative fashion egalitarianism as “leveling down”, seeing it as favoring an unattainable equality of condition rather than a desirable equality of opportunity.
