Revolt of the Elites

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, 246 pages

In his seminal work The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset identified the development of a deracinated, rootless mass society as the root of the disorders of the early twentieth century.  In contrast to Ortega y Gasset, for whom the collapse of culture primarily affected the lower classes, leaving them lost and prey to the totalitarian ideologies of demagogues, Christopher Lasch, at the end of the century, sees the ascendant ruling class as the most thoroughly deculturated segment of modern society.  In Lasch's view, the new meritocratic elite demonstrates all of the vices of the old aristocracy without any of the virtues.  Technologically unmoored from space, insulated by wealth from the difficulties of everyday life, educated to believe in the primacy of innovation and "progress" and therefore bereft of any kind of historical consciousness, the members of this global class possess a boundless faith in technocratic methods and a smug contempt for those who have not acquired their advantages.  According to Lasch, the old democratic ideal of the worker with a dignity and voice equal to that of the rich man has been replaced by social stratification into working and serving classes and a managerial class responsible for organizing political and economic life.

In Lasch's analysis, the provincialism of the elites is itself part of the larger self-segregation which characterizes post-modern society.  The growth of self-contained social bubbles is enabled by a dominant worldview which sees human fulfillment as nothing more than the acquisition of wealth and power, self-assertion and self-gratification.  True democracy, Lasch concludes, must be founded on something deeper than legal mechanisms.