ABSTRACT
The idea of “the new class” is an extension of Joseph Schumpeter’s and F. A. Hayek’s discussions of the intellectuals. The distinctive feature of a new intellectual aristocracy was the high moral purpose that animated it. As a class, it diffused through the leading administrative, educational, and intellectual institutions to form an Establishment that “gentled” the harsh features of English life. In the idea of a “new class” and its putative character, there have been four changes: predominance of liberalism; emergence of postindustrial values; the “revolution” in education; and the adversary culture. The ties of character structure, social system, and culture, which had given capitalism coherence in its bourgeois phase, have untraveled. A very different social form—in the sociological structure, the legal character of the corporation, the growth of state power as an independent force, and the hedonism of the culture—is still unnamed. It is not the product of the ‘new class.” Nor will the “new class” be its master.
