Additional Information
Book Details
Abstract
Elites have always ruled – wielding inordinate power and wealth, taking decisions that shape life for the rest. In good times the ‘1%’ can hide their privilege, or use growing social mobility and economic prosperity as a justification. When times get tougher there’s a backlash. So the first years of the twenty-first century – a time of financial crashes, oligarchy and corruption in the West; persistent poverty in the south; and rising inequality everywhere – have brought elites and ‘establishments’ under unprecedented fire. Yet those swept to power by this discontent are themselves a part of the elite, attacking from within and extending rather than ending its agenda. The New Power Elite shows how major political and social change is typically driven by renegade elite fractions, who co-opt or sideline elites’ traditional enemies. It is the first book to combine the politics, economics, sociology and history of elite rule to present a compact, comprehensive account of who’s at the top, and why we let them get there.
‘C. Wright Mills rides again, over 60 years later, in this vigorously argued analysis which is based on a powerful alliance of class and elite theory.’
—William Outhwaite, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University, UK
‘This book is a useful contribution to the current debates on the growing influence of the plutocracy. With its comparative and international focus, it adds an important dimension to the ongoing debates in the US and Europe.’
—Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, and Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, USA
Alan Shipman is an economist, currently with the Open University, UK, who has also worked as an emerging markets analyst, and industrial and social researcher.
June Edmunds lectures in sociology at the University of Sussex, UK, and is an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.
Bryan S. Turner is professor of the sociology of religion at the Australian Catholic University, an honorary professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and an emeritus professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA.
The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money-tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1%’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite, rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?
‘Greedy Elites’ derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of the society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. ‘Greedy Elites’ also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the US, ‘Greedy Elites’ offers new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of frictions within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class elements in their power struggles, and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.
Table of Contents
Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
---|---|---|---|
Cover | Cover 1 | ||
Front Matter | i | ||
Half-title | i | ||
Half-title | ii | ||
Title page | iii | ||
Copyright information | iv | ||
Table of contents | v | ||
List of illustrations | vii | ||
Preface | ix | ||
Chapter 1-8 | 1 | ||
Chapter One Elites Under Siege | 1 | ||
A Plague on All Your Palaces | 2 | ||
Incompetence | 6 | ||
Corruption | 9 | ||
Unfulfilled Expectation | 11 | ||
Unrepresentativeness and Illegitimacy | 14 | ||
Rescuers Gone Rogue: Establishments and Bureaucracies | 15 | ||
Sniping at Science | 19 | ||
Chapter Two Power, Networks and Higher Circles | 25 | ||
Softening, Diffusing and Dissolving Power | 25 | ||
Structurally Ingraining Power | 28 | ||
Power without the Powerful | 29 | ||
Power in Networks: Positions over People | 31 | ||
‘Deep State’ Distress: The Presidential Pushback | 36 | ||
Power in Networks: Strong, Weak and Old-School Ties | 38 | ||
Don’t Look Down | 42 | ||
Translating the Social Network | 43 | ||
Institutional Networks, Interlocks and the ‘Great Vampire Squid’ | 46 | ||
The New ‘Higher Circles’ | 50 | ||
Global Business | 51 | ||
Government | 52 | ||
‘Civil Society’ Organizations | 52 | ||
The Indispensable Military | 53 | ||
The Performative Elite: Celebrities | 54 | ||
A Cognitive Elite? Technocrats, Intellectuals and Experts | 55 | ||
Chapter Three Sources of Stability: Elite Circulations and Class Coalitions | 57 | ||
Renounce and Renew | 57 | ||
Top-Down Transformation | 60 | ||
Class Coalitions, and Elites’ Role in Building Them | 63 | ||
Elites as Creators and Destroyers of Coalition | 65 | ||
Progressive Distributional Coalitions | 67 | ||
Conservatives Learn to Trust the Crowd | 70 | ||
The Left Keeps Its Class | 75 | ||
Contemporary Discontent: The Storms below the Summit | 79 | ||
Chapter Four Rousing Rebellion: Elite Fractions and Class Divisions | 83 | ||
Reclassifying Classes | 83 | ||
Class Divisions in Practice: Characters and Capitals | 84 | ||
The Dynamics of Division | 86 | ||
An Elusive Elite | 88 | ||
Cooperation, Co-optation and Confrontation | 93 | ||
The Fragility of Class Coalitions | 95 | ||
Militant Middle Classes and Mobilized Mobs | 100 | ||
Obsolescent Coalitions? Personalizing Protest Politics | 102 | ||
Restoring Order | 103 | ||
Chapter Five Politics and Money | 107 | ||
Money Buying Power, Power Grabbing Money | 107 | ||
The Quest to Separate Policy from Profit | 109 | ||
Institutional Power/Money Separation, 1950–70 | 111 | ||
‘Symbiotic’ Separation, 1970–2000 | 115 | ||
The Twenty-First-Century Breakdown of Money/Power Separation | 118 | ||
Evidence for Plutocracy | 123 | ||
Slippage into Oligarchy | 126 | ||
Who Buys Influence, and How? | 130 | ||
Raw Deals | 133 | ||
Chapter Six Inequality: Causes and Consequences | 137 | ||
Stretching the Top of the Pyramid | 137 | ||
Squeezing the Lower Middle and the Base | 142 | ||
The Globalization Grievance | 145 | ||
Betrayed by Free Trade | 149 | ||
Nation States versus Global Corporations | 155 | ||
The Technological Imperative | 157 | ||
Financialization and Borderless Money | 160 | ||
Retreating from Redistribution | 162 | ||
Double-Edged Education | 166 | ||
Toleration for Rising Inequality | 170 | ||
Worlds Apart | 174 | ||
Chapter Seven Elites and Democracy | 177 | ||
Why Do Elites Concede Democratization? | 177 | ||
Democracy as Elite Protection Strategy | 179 | ||
Democracy via Distributional Struggle: The Middle Clash | 182 | ||
Less Revolution, More Redistribution | 184 | ||
Why Doesn’t a Universal Franchise Cause Elite Expropriation? | 188 | ||
National Politics and International Business | 191 | ||
Democracy as Consequence of Elite Ascendancy | 195 | ||
Political Institutions, Property and Elites | 197 | ||
Democracy and the Circulation of Elites | 199 | ||
Inequality and Democracy: An Unresolved Tension | 201 | ||
Chapter Eight Giveaways and Greed | 207 | ||
The Working Rich: Adding Capital and Labour Income | 207 | ||
Joining an All-Star Cast | 209 | ||
Cult of the Giver | 211 | ||
Righteous in Donation | 213 | ||
Commercial Philanthropy: When Public Influence Fails | 216 | ||
Charities of Fire? | 218 | ||
Public Handouts’ Hidden Role: Restoring Elite Cohesion | 220 | ||
A Generous Conclusion | 222 | ||
End Matter | 225 | ||
Afterword: The Best and the Rest | 225 | ||
Pluralist Counter- Case | 225 |