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Is There a 'New Class'?
| Article
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14424 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
5,301 Words |
| Author
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Nigel Ashford
Nigel Ashford is professor of politics at North Staffordshire
Polytechnic. He is currently writing a book on the managerial
class. |
The concept of a New Class challenges widely held views about the nature of class structure and conflict in modern Western societies. The New Class does not fit conveniently into the traditional concepts of the middle and working classes, and the debate about its existence requires a wide-ranging reexamination of modern society. The concept has been discussed from numerous perspectives, including that of Milovan Djilas, who uses the term to describe the new ruling class in communist societies; David Barzelon, who perceives it as a new revolutionary class in Western societies allied to the working class; and John Kenneth Galbraith, who identifies the existence of the "technostructure," a dominant class of middle managers and technocratic experts. The perspective examined here is that of the neoconservatives, who describe the New Class as an educated upper middle class in an adversarial relationship with American economic, political, and cultural beliefs, and who threaten the political stability of Western societies.
The New Class is basic to the neoconservative view of the world, because, first, it is a significant political force and neoconservatives' major enemy; second, it is the primary cause of a crisis of legitimacy and political stability; and, third, its existence suggests a significant change in the distribution of power in Western societies.
Definition
Paul Weaver defines the New Class as "that rapidly growing and increasingly influential part of the upper middle class that feels itself in a more or less adversarial position vis-à-vis American society and tends to seek its vocation in the public and not-for-profit sectors." The New Class by this definition is upper middle-class by virtue of education and occupation and hostile to the basic values of American society. It is also employed primarily outside of business and industry.
Daniel Bell argues that this New Class has emerged out of a postindustrial order in which the production and distribution of knowledge has replaced the production and distribution of goods as the principal activity of society, the governing principle of its organization, and the chief sources of power. "Just as the business firm was the key institution of the past hundred years because of its role in organizing production for the mass creation of products," Bell says, "the university will become the central institution of the next hundred years because of its role as the new source of innovation and knowledge." This knowledge class is the intellectuals--broadly conceived, those who are
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