Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

NOTES

represented ‘an unworthy and dishonourable sequence’ (de Kadt 1939, cit. Pels 1993a:82).

20Cf. the special issue on ‘Carl Schmitt: Enemy or Foe?’, Telos 72, Summer 1987, e.g. the contributions by the editors and by former Althusserian Paul Hirst, as well as the section on Schmitt in the Spring issue of the same year. Since then Telos has regularly translated and discussed Schmitt as well as New Right polymath De Benoist. On the latter, and the New Right more generally, see extensively Telos 98–9, Winter 1993/Spring 1994. Cf. also the special issue on Schmitt of De Benoist’s journal Nouvelle École 44, Spring 1987.

21As Lefort writes:

The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible.

(1988:11)

5 SOCIAL SCIENCE AS POWER THEORY

1Most outspokenly perhaps in Elias: ‘It was the insight into the relative autonomy of the subject matter of “sociology” which was the decisive step forward towards establishing sociology as a relatively autonomous science’ (1978:45) (italics

omitted). On the inversion of project and object see more extensively Pels (1983). This constructivist wordplay also occurs in Latour (1988:73) and Haraway (‘objects are boundary projects’) (1991:201).

2Once again, Carl Schmitt had an early inkling of this ‘rivalry effect’ when he described the ‘polemical precision’ of political and social-scientific concepts, the polemical value of the concept of ‘society’, and the ‘oppositional’ origin of sociology

(1931:73–4n). See Chapter 8 for Schmitt’s anticipation of the idea of a ‘politics of knowledge’.

3 Most typically, once again, in Elias (1984:38). But Elias only reproduces the argument of Durkheim’s inaugural lecture ‘Cours de science sociale’ (1970 [1888]: 78–85). Cf. also Heilbron (1995) and my critical review (1996b).

4Cf. Tönnies’ multiple use of this conceptual pair as summarized by Szacki (1979: 343–4).

5Becker and Barnes (1952:575) early on advanced that Comte did not distinguish clearly between sociology and political science, but apparently regarded sociology as ‘the perfected political science of the future’. For similar views, see Gouldner (1985:269) and Wagner (1990). For views of Comte which differ interestingly from the present one, see Vernon (1984) and Heilbron (1995).

6For Durkheim, authority indeed constituted the dorsal spine of morality; in this respect, Nisbet’s first pair of unit-ideas are mutually substitutable. Social discipline is significantly referred to as ‘the vital knot of collective life’ (Durkheim 1986:145). As Durkheim typically argues, ‘there are no morals without discipline and authority, and the sole rational authority is the one that a society is endowed with in relation to its members’; the state is regularly identified as the prime organ to institute and preserve this moral discipline (cf. 1992:72–3). In a text from 1886, he already affirms that the distinction between governors and governed is ‘presque contemporaine de la vie sociale’ (1970:201).

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7Similar considerations have been expressed by Pels (1983; 1984), Wagner (1990), Turner (1992), Gane (1992), and Müller (1993). Challenger (1994) argues for a communitarian Durkheim who falls closely in line with neoAristotelian ethics, but curiously, he refrains from discussing professional ethics, democratic corporatism, or any other item in Durkheim’s omnipresent

political vocabulary.

8The shift is clearly evidenced in Comte’s application of his Law of Three Stages to politics. If the ‘doctrine of Kings’ represented the theological state of politics, and the ‘doctrine of the People’ expressed its metaphysical condition, the Scientific Doctrine of politics ‘considers the social state in which the human race has

always been found by observers as the necessary effect of its organisation’ (Comte, in Fletcher, 1974:135–6).

9Comte makes a special point of emphasizing that the principle of the division of

labour was discovered by Aristotle far earlier and formulated more suggestively than in the works of the political economists.

10If there exists an important historical affinity between the ideas of ‘community’ and ‘polity’, we gain a view of the specificity of sociology’s historical object/ project which differs equally from functionalist reconstructions which emphasize normative solidarity and from conflictual ones which emphasize domination and elite rule. The analysis of power and politics is central to the sociological tradition in both these variants, and never very distant from the analysis of values, norms, and representations. Without wishing to deny that the breach between consensus and conflict theory indicates a major cleavage in the history of social thought, it is neither the only nor perhaps the most influential one. By neutralizing this old schism, we are better equipped to thematize the relative unity of the core sociological project vis-à-vis those theories and traditions against which it rose as a counter-science.

11In Meisel’s crisp characterization, elitism is ‘at its crudest the notion that The Few should rule because they do in fact rule, and less crudely the contention that, since only a few can rule, The Many do not and never will’ (1958:3). Parry likewise notes that the elitist thesis does somewhat more than assert that a minority decides and the majority obeys, which in itself is an obvious truism with no power to explain political relationships. The elitist contention is in fact a much stronger one: ‘the dominant minority cannot be controlled by the majority, whatever democratic mechanisms are used’ (1969:31).

12It is telling that even Elias, who placed so much weight upon the institutional disjunction of society and state as major stimulus of the invention of sociology, adopted what is to all effect a Tocquevillean position when identifying the process of increasing democratization, i.e. of the diffusion of power as ‘the basic transformation of society to which the rise of a science of society pointed’. The discovery of ‘society’ as the ensemble of diffused power relationships is presented as a generalization of early political economy’s concern with ‘civil society’; ‘society’ is presented as self-evidently broader than ‘economy’, and ‘power’ as self-evidently coincident with the ‘social’ (1984:48–9).

13Cf. Levine (1995) for a (re)vision of the sociological tradition which follows different fault lines, but is equally sensitive to the distinctive orientations entrenched in national traditions.

14However, Saint-Simon and Comte also reflected the state-society dilemma in their divergent assessments of political economy and economic behaviour and their different views of the role of the state. While understating Saint-Simon’s anti-statism, Gouldner somewhat overstates Comte’s commitment to ‘civil society’ (1980:367). For an extended defence of the notion of civil society as a ‘third project’, which is also linked backwards to Tocqueville, see Cohen and Arato (1992).

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15Shapiro has located an even earlier use in a 1785 letter by John Adams, where it vaguely refers to ‘political theory’ (Shapiro 1984).

16Durkheim’s initial question, which continued to underlie his thinking, was: ‘are individualism and socialism irreconcileable? If not, what kind of individualism and what kind of socialism are compatible?’ (Filloux 1993:212). Cf. the classically ‘neutral’ formulation in the preface of Division:

The question that has been the starting point for our study has been that of the connection between the individual personality and social solidarity. How does it come about that the individual, whilst becoming more autonomous, depends ever more closely upon society? How can he become at the same time more of an individual and yet more linked to society? For it is indisputable that these two movements, however contradictory they appear to be, are carried on in tandem.

(Durkheim 1984:xxx)

17The first Methodenstreit, at the beginnings of the Verein in the 1870s, had ranged Schmoller against Menger in a famous criticism of the latter’s individualism and non-interventionism.

18On Sombart’s ‘aristocratic turn’ see also Lindenlaub (1967:314ff.). Freyer explicitly traced the emergence of German sociology both to Von Stein and to an ‘antisociologist’ such as Treitschke. On Weber in the Nazi reception, see Klingemann (1996:171ff.); on the intellectual relationship between Freyer and Weber, see also Mommsen (1989:176–8). In his seminal work on Weber’s political thought, Mommsen extensively discussed Schmitt’s radicalization of Weber’s principle of plebiscitary leadership democracy (1974:407; cf. Turner and Factor 1987). The intriguing relationship between Weber and Michels is discussed by, for example, Beetham (1977:175–7) and Mommsen (1989:102–5).

19Cf. Ionescu (1976:6–8). The titles of Saint-Simon’s consecutive reviews confirm this impression: starting with l’Industrie (1816–18), which was designed to forge a connection between ‘scientific and literary industry’ and ‘commercial and manufactory industry’, he tried his luck again with le Politique (1819), edited in collaboration with Comte and Lachevardière; at the demise of the latter journal, Saint-Simon published a brochure which was expanded and enriched to form l’Organisateur (1819–20).

20The social body consists of two great families: that of intellectuals, or industrials of theory, and that of immediate producers, or scholars of application’ (Industrie III, cit. Durkheim 1958:176). Saint-Simon is somewhat confused about the inclusion of the savants in the ‘industrial class’ (which in 1803 are considered ‘industriels théoriques’, whereas in the Catéchisme des industriels of 1824 they are seen as a kind of organic intelligentsia of the actual industrials: the leaders of commerce and manufacture; throughout his writings the relative importance of both elites is variably assessed (cf. Dautry 1951:84, 123).

21This principle of the priority of ‘production’ over property is presented as the ‘sommaire des faits observes de la science politique’. Although Saint-Simon considers the right of property to be ‘incontestably the sole basis which it is possible to give to a political society’ he refuses to conclude that it cannot be modified, ‘for the individual right of property can only be founded upon the common and general utility of the exercise of this right—a utility which can vary with the times’ (1966 II:89–90). Cf. Durkheim, who (sympathetically) underscored that the core of Saint-Simon’s industrial politics was the reconstitution of the system of property (1958:198–9).

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22 As Saint-Simon writes:

It is true that property makes for stable government, but it is only when property is not divorced from enlightenment that government can safely be placed on such a basis. It is right, therefore, that the government should co-opt and endow with property those who are without property but distinguished by outstanding merit, in order that talent and property should not be divided. For talent, which is the more powerful and active force, would soon seize on property if the two were not united.

(1964:47)

23Cf. Comte’s preface to his (1851 I) and his introduction to the six opuscules which were reprinted as an appendix to tome IV.

24Comte’s Cours, Leçon 47, repeated his early criticism of the ‘isolation’ of political economy, which was mistakenly considered to be ‘entirely distinct and independent from the ensemble of political [!] science’, which was not sufficiently ‘observational’ and hence ‘metaphysical’ (his prime example here was Smith’s famous work), and which clung to a dogmatic notion of the ‘necessary absence of all regulatory intervention’ (1975b:92ff.). Cf. also Comte’s early positive appreciation of the influence of Saint-Simon on this point (1970:475). The SaintSimonian appraisal of political economy is of course fully restated by Durkheim (1975:281–2; 1958). Evidence of Comte’s ‘third’ position is provided by his symmetrical criticism of the traditional treatment of the political system as an ‘isolated fact’, to which are attributed ‘those social forces which on the contrary produce it…the political order is and can only be the expression of civil order’ (1974:142–3).

25Lorenz von Stein’s Staatswissenschaft was interpreted in similar terms (Durkheim 1975:336). Somewhat later, Durkheim translated die positive Staatswirtschaft as ‘l’économie sociale positive’ (id. 381). Cf. also Durkheim (1975:148–9).

26Reviewing Merlino’s political theory, Durkheim criticized the author for failing to grasp ‘the true nature and role of social discipline, that is to say what constitutes the vital centre (nœud vital) of collective life’ (1977:171).

27In it, the term scientia politica figured as apparent equivalent for ‘social science’, while civitas could be variously rendered as ‘city’, ‘state’, or ‘society’ (1966: 25– 6n.). Cf. Comte’s similar critical appraisal of Montesquieu (1974:157ff.).

28In his earliest publication on Schäffle, Durkheim wrote: ‘L’autorité dirige la vie sociale, mais ne la crée ni ne la remplace. Elle coordonne les mouvements, mais les suppose’ (1975:367, 369).

29For this important distinction, see e.g. Manolescu (1934) and Schmitter (1977).

30For various assertions of the contemporary relevance of Durkheimian democratic corporatism, cf. Hearn (1985), Pels (1988), Pearce (1989), and Hirst (1990; 1994).

31The characteristic definition of the state as reflexive centre of society is also first found in Schäffle (1896 I:144, 527; II:427–8).

32Cf. on this progression from project to object also Lacroix (1981:62ff.). Durkheim’s various demarcations of sociology against political philosophy and political economy (and against socialism) were invariably cast in terms of the positivistic distinction between ‘art’ and ‘science’, even though sociology itself was ‘artful’ and ‘projective’ from the very beginning (cf. Pels 1983; 1984). In a suggestive article, Tenbruck has described this reverse side of the dual determination of sociology and society as ‘the birth of society from the spirit of sociology’, and has likewise traced it to Durkheim, the founder. ‘Society’

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as a reality sui generis, he contends, is not so much ‘discovered’ as derived from the prior domanial and epistemological ambitions of Durkheimian sociology (Tenbruck 1981). On the intellectual imperialism of the Durkheimian school cf. also Karady (1979). Bourdieu has aptly characterized Durkheimian sociology as ‘an ambiguous, dual, masked science; one that had to conceal and renounce its own nature as a political science in order to gain acceptance as an academic science’ (1993b:27–8).

33At one point, Durkheim himself signalled the oscillatory definition of the state as both part and whole which had become this tradition’s trademark (1986:45).

34Religion, in this context as in others, could be taken as virtually synonymous with morality or with ‘collective representations’. Durkheim implicitly followed Richard, for example, in the latter’s (anti-Marxist) argument that not the functions of nutrition and production are preponderant, but the ‘functions of relation’, i.e. the representative functions (1975:240).

35Reacting to Michels, who dedicated the first edition of Political Parties to him, Weber censured his pupil for having failed to recognize that all forms of social relationship, even the most personal, were in a sense power relations (Herrschaftsbeziehungen). Opposing Michels’ residual syndicalism, Weber declared inconceivable a social order which was free from all domination (Mommsen 1989: 98). In his subsequent support of the fascist theory of power and the state, of course, Michels overtook Weber on the right flank, drawing expressly upon the latter’s views about plebiscitary democracy and charismatic leadership (Beetham 1977:175–7). More generally, Weber’s notion of the irreversible advance of Führerdemokratie ‘was by no means immune from possible reinterpretation along anti-democratic lines’ (Mommsen 1989:98; cf. also Klingemann 1996:120ff. on Alfred Weber). Thus the Weberian sociology of Herrschaft developed along a dual historical track, feeding simultaneously the illiberal political theory of, for example, Schmitt and Freyer and the postwar liberal sociology of organization.

36As Parkin has observed, Weber’s argument for the ubiquitous necessity of Verfügungsgewalt as ‘some kind of control over the necessary services of labor and of the means of production’ (1979:67–8) is not logically connected to his more central axiom about the omnipresence of domination and leadership, and also stands isolated from his discussion of social closure and property (1979:44).

37Parkin (1972:44–6):

to speak of the distribution of power could be understood as another way of describing the flow of rewards…it can be thought of as a concept or metaphor which is used to depict the flow of resources which constitutes this system. And as such it is not a separate dimension of stratification at all.

Cf. also Giddens (1973:44) and Scott (1996:38ff.).

38Foucault has put in at least one disclaimer about not having intended to replace an explanation based upon the economy by an explanation in terms of power (1985: 75). It can be argued, however, that the net balance of his sprawling conception of power is precisely to effect such a reversal.

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6 POWER, PROPERTY, AND MANAGERIALISM

1This statement requires some qualification, in order to avoid a precipitate homogenization of the tableau of contemporary sociological thought. In contrast to ‘early modern’ sociology, which is more definitely centred around a power nucleus, ‘late modern’ sociology once again appears divided between a generalized economic and a generalized power vocabulary. Perhaps this new situation is symptomatic of the relative supersession of the disciplinary contest between sociology and political economy, and more specifically, that between academic sociology and Marxism, which has long defined the outer perimeters of both. We should be aware, in other words, that sociology is no longer clearly demarcated from other forms of social enquiry, and has evolved into a transdisciplinary and pluralist enterprise. The power-oriented historical sociology of Elias and Mann, for example, is balanced by the sociological historiography which has developed from neo-Marxist impulses in the work of, for example, Moore, Wallerstein, Anderson, and Skocpol. The various ‘postmodernist’ currents in sociology, which are more partial to an expanded Nietzschean analytic of power, are currently balanced by the influential paradigm of rational choice (e.g. Coleman, Hechter, Opp), which is in turn close to the ‘rational choice Marxism’ which has been elaborated by, for example, Elster, Roemer, Wright, and Van Parijs. All of these currents in some way synthesize Marxian and Weberian problematics, as is also

visible in the work of ‘vocabulary mixers’ such as Gouldner, Collins, and Bourdieu.

2Particularly representative of this pattern is the ‘figurational’ notion of power which has been advanced by Norbert Elias. Elias’s conception, somewhat like Foucault’s, is intended to remove traditional suspicions about its ‘unethical’ nature; power is considered neither good nor bad, because it is just simply there, as an ever-present property of social relationships. Power balances constitute an integral element of all human relationships, because they are immediately implied in the very fact of functional social interdependence (Elias 1978:78, 100). Property or possession are largely taken for granted as special cases of power exercise (cf.

Wilterdink 1984; Szirmaï 1986).

3One of the more famous footnotes in the sociological tradition might well be Mills’ note to ch. 12, in which he rejected the notion of ‘ruling class’ in the following terms:

‘Ruling class’ is a badly loaded phrase. ‘Class’ is an economic term; ‘rule’ is a political one. The phrase ‘ruling class’ thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically…. Specifically, the phrase ‘ruling class’ does not allow enough autonomy to the political order and its agents, and it says nothing about the military as such…. We hold that such a simple view of ‘economic determinism’ must be elaborated by ‘political determinism’ and ‘military determinism’; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions. Those are the major reasons we prefer ‘power elite’ to ‘ruling class’ as a characterising phrase for the higher circles when we consider them in terms of power.

(Mills 1956:227)

4Dahrendorf (1979:48ff.) concedes the formal character of his concept of power/ authority (without surrendering it), and locates the substratum of social structure and the motive force of social processes in a generalized struggle for ‘life chances’.

279

7Although originally deriving his ‘two-step’ ownership model of the managerial class from an extension of Marxian categories, Burnham swiftly changed his

allegiance to the alternative patrimony of power (elite) theory (cf. Burnham 1963 [1943]).

8 ‘Control’, as Berle and Means defined it,

lies in the hands of the individual or group who have the actual power to select the board of directors (or its majority), either by mobilizing the legal right to choose them—‘controlling’ a majority of the votes directly or through some legal device—or by exerting pressure which influences their choice.

(1968:66–7)

Cf. Berle (1959:70): ‘Control is quite simply the capacity to make or unmake a board of directors’.

9It is good to recall that even Berle and Means admitted the possibility of assuring effective control based upon ownership of less than 1 per cent of total assets.

10If Bottomore (1966:79, 82) observes that the notion of the separation of ownership from control is ‘at best a half truth’, one might still wish to prefer it to an undivided error.

11Grint (1995:42) cites research demonstrating the persistence of family control, even in large-scale enterprises such as the Japanese zaibatsu and the South Korean chaebols.

12Fennema has spotted the existence of a ‘level of analysis’ problem, but mistakenly supposes that it is soluble if shifted towards a higher level of abstraction. The debate between Marxists and managerialists, he observes, ‘misses the point in so far as both sides confuse the theory of intracorporate power (as developed by Berle and Means) with a theory of intercorporate power’. The managerial thesis might be true if corporations are studied in isolation, but does not need to be correct when external relations with other firms are systematically considered (1982:63). Instead, as I have argued before, the debate is largely replayed on the analytical level of transcorporate or ‘classwide’ control.

13McDermott has likewise observed that quasi-collective ownership structures in the corporation have largely replaced the property-owning family as the central institution of modern capitalist society. The most striking feature of this new property system is that social relations themselves, not merely things and their titles, appear in property form. ‘Corporate form’, as a dynamic relation between management, professionals, and workers, is itself a productive force, and collectively ‘owned’ by the top management. This situation cannot be treated as an extension of private property, as Berle and Means do: it is classes, not individuals or families, that now exercise property claims. Modern capitalism, in McDermott’s view, ultimately rests ‘on a class owning and disposing over its common property as a class’ (1991:7, 77–80).

14The combined parameters of high/low closure and differential agency also provide a general background for the zoning model of social theory and its historicogeographical distribution of liberal, corporatist, and etatist theoretical emphases, as outlined in previous chapters. While liberal property theory occupies the

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lower left corner of the scheme, etatist power theory is more nearly located towards the top right corner, with intermediate forms spread along the diagonal.

15Recently, Eyal et al. (1997) have also employed the appelation ‘capitalism without capitalists’ to characterize the rise of a new cultural capital-based managerial class in the countries of east Central Europe.

16Cf. Grint’s constructivist and reflexive approach to management as a matter of active symbolic ascription: ‘Who managers are depends upon who has the power to constitute certain forms of action as the action of managers’ (1995:47).

17This general perspective of the contested and contestable character of expertise is shared by Pierre Bourdieu. ‘Properties’ or criteria of classification are always ‘at stake’ and are instruments in the class struggle itself; the space of ‘properties’ is therefore also a field of struggle for their appropriation (cf. Bourdieu and De Saint-Martin 1978:6).

18The role played formerly by ‘proof of ancestry’, as Weber already saw, was increasingly taken by the patent of education (1978:1000).

19Bourdieu and De Saint-Martin’s important study focuses upon the ‘chiasmic’ structure of the dominant class, which is not only vertically divided according to general amount of capital, but also horizontally divided between those whose patrimony is dominated by economic capital and those who are primarily cultural capitalists. Their major horizontal distinction separates the patrons privés from the patrons d’État, and a mode of reproduction ‘à dominante familiale’ from a mode of reproduction ‘à composante scholaire’.

20It is Chandler’s general view that the market remains the generator of demand for goods and services, but that modern business enterprise has taken over the functions of coordinating flows of goods through existing processes of production and distribution, and of allocating funds and personnel for future production and distribution. The rise of this coordinating function is also the rise of a ‘new class’ of middle and top managers. Cf. also Fennema’s remark that ‘the interlocking directorate is halfway between market and hierarchy’ (1982:43).

21As Webster writes: ‘A good case can be made for the view that management is in essence a category of information work’. Taylor’s Scientific Management (1947) is summarized as implying that ‘the raison d’être of management is to act as information specialists—ideally as monopolists—as close observers, analysts, and planners of capital’s interests’. Taylor’s major ambition was to argue that management was designated to perform the ‘brainwork’ of organizations and the surveillance of the production process (Webster 1995:71; cf. Stabile 1984:31ff.).

7 INTELLECTUAL CLOSURE AND THE NEW

CLASS

1Evidence of the repressed role of ‘knowledgeable organization’ in modern Marxism is, for example, found in Nicos Poulantzas’s conception of the nouvelle petite bourgeoisie, which was explicitly designated as a ‘knowledge class’, but as one which neither owned its means of production nor laboured productively. Its primary service was the part it played in the ideological and political subordination of the working class to capital; its knowledge capital resulted from an intellectual expropriation of the working class (1974a:236–8). The Ehrenreichs’ conception of the ‘professional-managerial class’ (PMC) offers another instructive example. PMC functionaries are non-owners who perform essentially non-productive mental functions which reproduce capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. Although

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it is a ‘third class’ which may differ in outlook and interests from the ruling class, there is an ‘ultimate concordance’ between bourgeoisie and PMC, which also stands in an ‘objectively’ antagonistic position towards the working class. The PMC is doubly derivative because, first, its function is to reproduce capitalist culture and cultural reproduction itself is ‘non-productive labour’, and second, because PMC functions are based upon the expropriation of once-indigenous working-class cultures and skills (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979).

2However, these precarious moments of balance had a habit of extending across the entire spectrum of history. Leaving aside precapitalist and postcapitalist managerial states, which were exceptional by definition, the label was attributed to absolute monarchy (two long centuries, at the very least), Bonapartism (First and Second), Bismarckism, and, by contemporary Marxists, to the fascist movements and states of the Interbellum. This turned Anglo-Saxon liberal

capitalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into one of those rules which could only be proven by their exceptions.

3Marx here repeated Hegel’s observation that government and state officials constituted a ‘new middle estate’, which was an estate of Bildung, ‘the class in which the consciousness of right and the developed intelligence of the mass of the people is found’ (1981:104) (translation corrected). In a near-contemporary

article, Marx described the censorship hierarchy as a ‘Bürokratie der Intelligenz’ (1843a:20).

4Cf. Stehr and Ericson (1992:10) on knowledge as a relation of social actors to things and facts, but also to rules and laws and other actors. Collins, whose notion of ‘positional property’ includes symbolic position shaping and hence boundary work and legitimacy work, circumscribes property genetically as ‘a

particular degree of tenure of action towards certain objects and persons’ (1979:54).

5A possibly rich analysis of property vs. power theories of bureaucracy, which would run parallel to the treatment of management offered in the previous

chapter, is not undertaken here.

6Berger dislikes the term ‘New Class’ and opts in favour of ‘knowledge class’ as comprising the generic purveyors of symbolic knowledge. They make up a much

larger group than the people conventionally called ‘intellectuals’, which may be defined as the primary producers of symbolic knowledge, and form only a kind of ‘upper crust’ of the broader knowledge class (1986:66–7).

7Bazelon has sarcastically identified the neo-conservative outcry against the New Class as ‘itself a New Class maneuver’, executed by intellectuals who made believe that they were not themselves part of it (1979:445, 447).

8See the older analyses of a ‘capitalism without capitalists’, as reported in the previous chapter. Cf. also Eyal et al. (1997).

9Stehr insists that the ‘knowledge-based occupations’ (experts, counsellors, and advisers, which he sharply distinguishes from intellectuals) will not accede to mastery of the society, and are not likely to form a social class, because the scientification of social relations generates an ‘essential fragility’ of social structures, which dissipates and operates against formations attempting to monopolize decisions and usurp social futures. Experts, in his view, although they wield cultural power, do not control a more traditional and more consequential form of power, namely political power, which is ‘the raw capacity to impose one’s will against the will of others’ (1994a:168–9). However, I believe that the ‘generalists of power’ identified above do combine cultural, political, and economic power

to such an extent as to legitimate the hypothesis of a New Class of intellectuals.

10This intrusion of ‘intellectual technologies’ is typically captured by Bell and other functionalists in terms of a shift of the ‘normative centre’ of society towards the ethos and the method of science; cf. his assertion that ‘the scientific estate—its ethos and organization—is the monad that contains within itself the imago of the

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future society’ (1976a:378, 386). Although Bell acknowledges that this ethos may easily turn into an ideology, he does not face the darker prospect that this progressive culturalization of non-cultural domains may also entail the universalization of an interested logic of cultural capital and intellectual rivalry: of a mandarin logic which must continually recreate belief in its own expertise as objective, and thereby routinely turns knowledge into private property (cf. Derber et al. 1990:4–5, 59).

11Parkin remarks that ‘bourgeois’ forms of closure such as property or credentials are less reliable than pre-bourgeois ones in preserving family privileges intact over several generations. This ‘raises the crucial question of how dedicated the modern bourgeoisie actually is to its self-perpetuation through the blood line’. The bourgeois class system appears more biased in the direction of sponsorship and careful selection of successors than in that of hereditary transmission (1979:60– 3). However, Parkin’s conflation of property and credentials as ‘bourgeois’ closure devices has the effect of underrating the kinship variable, especially in the case of material property, and thus to miss the difference in class reproduction rate between ideal-typical systems of property closure and ideal-typical systems of credential closure.

12Collins does of course include an important cultural element, in so far as symbolic power (the power to define the tasks of positions and organizations) is identified as an essential element of political labour and positional property (1979:50, 57). But his notion of political labour is still ruled by an emphasis upon the imposition of control over the conditions of work and appropriation of the fruits that issue therefrom.

13In order to avert a senseless priority battle around the concept of cultural capital, let me note that first formulations of it are encountered in anarchists such as Bakunin, Machajski, and Nomad, and that Karl Mannheim and Hendrik De Man already describe education and culture as new forms of capital (Mannheim 1968 [1929]:138–9; De Man 1931:79ff.; 1933:139ff.). From about 1933, and manifestly inspired by Machajski and Nomad, Lasswell analysed the new phenomenon of ‘skill politics’ as announcing a world revolution of permanent modernization under the leadership of the ‘symbol specialists’ or intellectuals, whose primary capital consisted of their knowledge (1977:152ff., 177, 297, 385).

14Reputations may of course ‘hold’ as a result of positional property and the presence of credentials, even though the practical competences have faded.

15Since Collins’ distinction is an analytical one, any job may be apportioned between the two categories in varying degrees. The modern occupational order can then be conceived as a ‘range of variations in the possession of “political” resources for controlling the conditions of work and appropriating the fruits of production; hence it can be seen as a range of mixtures of productive work with political work’ (Collins 1979:52–3).

16We may also recall our earlier exposition of Marx’s and Weber’s dual conception of bureaucracy as simultaneously functionalizing expertise and enclosing it by way of the ‘administrative secret’.

17Cf. a typical generalizing statement such as the following: ‘Ideology is both false consciousness and rational discourse’ (Gouldner 1976:38).

18Gouldner’s rather summary sketch of the old economic and political classes between which the new knowledge class elbows itself to historical prominence, also lacks an elaboration of its own ‘vertical’ composition or its marginalized or excluded groups (its ‘underclass’). The nearest Gouldner gets to a theory of internal conflict is his paired definition of ‘intellectuals’ and ‘intelligentsia’, whose juxtaposition is presented as a major requirement and asset of any general theory of the New Class. Even if one disregards the fact that this division concerns two elites within a larger class, the distinction is not clear cut, and is further impaired

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