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The New Power Elite

The New Power Elite

Alan Shipman | June Edmunds | Bryan Turner

(2018)

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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