In the early to mid-1970s, a group of American and European social critics began to write about what they saw as the increasingly large social and cultural imprint of a “New Class” of credentialed experts. The new class, according to these writers, consisted of “a large part of academia, the bureaucracy, the media, and related occupations and institutions.” Members of this new class were either highly educated or in the process of completing academic qualifications. Moreover, the new class had its own particular “values and sensibilities.” Initially cultivated by the vanguard elements of the new class, these values were, new class theorists believed, gradually percolating into other, less elite sectors—business schools and colleges of education, state and corporate bureaucracies, the clergy, public relations and the advertising industry, and the trade unions.
The term “new class” was not in itself a new one. It was coined by Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 to describe what he saw as the huge technocratic overclass that would be required to administer the Marxian version of socialism. The immense concentrations of state power and responsibility implied in Marx’s vision would, Bakunin predicted,
Read Full Article »demand … immense knowledge and many heads “overflowing with brains” … It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!
