Intellectuals on Tap

A specter is haunting Irving Kristol—the specter of The New Class. It consists of “some millions of people whom liberal capitalism has sent to college in order to help manage its affluent, highly technological, mildly paternalistic ‘post-industrial society.'” These educators, journalists, city planners, social workers, editors, and civil servants constitute, so Kristol argues, a clear and present danger to the good, that is the business, society. It is against them that he directs, to borrow from Dr. Johnson, his “stratagems of well-bred malignity.”

There seems to be a paradox here: Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, Wall Street Journal columnist, and Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University, seems by all counts to be a member of the class on which he heaps so much obloquy. Is this a case of self-hatred? Not really, the paradox is only apparent. It is not The New Class as such that he denounces but the values most of its members espouse and the power to which they allegedly aspire. Kristol defends virtue and the Protestant Ethic and is hence exempt from class biases as he rides into battle against those members of The New Class, evidently the great majority, who have departed from the path of rectitude by displaying

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