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A theory of politics and society centered on elites emerged early in the twentieth century. However, the theory was relegated to the century’s intellectual sidelines by visions of thoroughly egalitarian societies and wholly self-governing democracies. No such societies or democracies materialized, and the century’s main socio-political developments were broadly consistent with elite theory. In ominous twenty-first century domestic and international circumstances, there are reasons to believe that the long eclipse of an elite theory of politics and society is ending. Yet, confusion envelops the elite concept, the meaning of elitism, and elite theory’s main tenets. This chapter seeks to dispel some of this confusion.

Using key texts written by John Locke, this chapter considers the historical foundations of the association between leisure and morality that can be found in his work. As well as considering the historical foundations of his ideas, particularly their connection to the epistemology of Plato and Aristotle, this chapter also considers the relationship between Locke’s principles of moral education and his political theory. As well as Locke’s political theory being seen as highly influential in liberalist political philosophy, both in earlier incarnations and its more contemporary articulation as neo-liberalism, it is argued that his associated thinking around recreation and moral development have also been influential. That is especially the case in paternalistic approaches to leisure policy and the discourses commonly associated with the dominant imaginary of commodified leisure discernable in current hegemonic neo-liberalism.

The chapter aims to establish that, given the conditions of deliberative democracy and the institutions of modern democracies, citizens can reasonably regard each other as equal epistemic authorities on justice, that is, as prima facie equally reliable judges of the rightness of political decisions according to a procedure-independent criterion of rightness. The conditions of deliberative democracy are widespread decentered deliberation about complex issues. Of primary importance among the institutions of modern democracy are political parties who translate abstract value judgments into sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conceptions of justice, thus lowering the epistemic burden on citizens. The chapter also develops the important argument that political disagreement is both a reasonable and rational outcome of public deliberation. In addition, an interlude on the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill shows the inherent incongruities of his epistemic political elitism.

During the first week of my first semester of teaching at CSU, I attended many “Welcome Week” activities for new and incoming CSU students. At one of the events hosted by the ELC, Vice-Chancellor Tsing played karaoke videos from famous Broadway musicals. During the group singing of the song “Edelweiss” from the musical The Sound of Music, the Vice-Chancellor turned to me and admonished the new students for not singing very loudly. She commented, “The students here are not very civilized. They don’t have any knowledge of culture.” These comments echoed her later remarks in our 2010 interview cited in Chap. 2 about using musicals and extra-curricular activities to “align their [students’] moral compass in that direction that will be beneficial to society,” and they struck me at the time as very strange, if not harboring a cultural elitism and even linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992, 2009). Why would students entering a university in southern China be expected to know the words to an older English musical? And why was it the responsibility of English teachers and the university to “civilize” the students and “align their moral compass”? In my years of teaching in the USA, I had never been tasked by any supervisor with instilling any particular moral or ethical values with my students. Certainly, it can be argued that any educational context is full of values and part of the aim of attending a university is to be socialized into the “legitimate language” and “habitus” of the ruling elites (Bourdieu, 1991), but these goals and processes were never so clearly stated to me as they were during that first karaoke experience with my students.

A key resource of professional service firms (PSFs) is their organizational identity (OI). It enables PSFs to develop a positive external reputation and strong member identification. While the significance and effects of OI in PSFs are thoroughly studied, the differences between the two archetypes of PSFs, professional partnerships (P2) and managed professional businesses (MPB), are less clear. Through a multiple qualitative case study with four management consulting firms, it was revealed that both similarities and differences exist. Although notions of elitism were observed in all cases, P2s depict a deeper elite status, which is further fostered through their organic growth strategy. While MPBs, in pursuing a more aggressive approach to growth, depict ideographic identities and tendencies toward environmental adaptation. Thus, OI construction both shapes and is shaped by growth strategies.

The imagination of the Italia futurista women was stimulated by lively debates within their avant-garde circle. These debates were extolling modernity, masculinity, elitism, and nationalism, in a society witnessing the devastating effects of the war and being transformed by new global configurations, increased mass culture, and burgeoning feminist demands. Their imagination was also stirred by the cross-cultural exchange within their circle and the influence of such trends as eugenics, naturism and esotericism.

The World Economic Forum is often portrayed as a bastion of global elitism. Nevertheless, its 2014 list of the most urgent global problems reads like a Marxist critique of advanced capitalism: deepening inequalities, persistent jobless growth, lack of leadership, and weakening of democracy are among the top 10 global problems, along with environmental issues and international politics (World Economic Forum 2014). This constellation of urgent issues could certainly be characterized as constituting a ‘wicked’ problem, that is, super-complex, persistent, and resistant to resolution; partial solutions of one aspect often leading to intensification of others.

The utopian realist perspective enables a reading of Giddens that makes his analysis of late modernity defensible in relation to its critics; however, there is no indication of how exactly his analysis of late modernity points towards social reform or transformation. This is problematic, firstly because Giddens explicitly notes that this is the aim of his work, and secondly because without a clear focus on how to achieve social transformation, his analysis of late modernity is vulnerable to charges of elitism. To address these points, we need to consider one further element of his analysis of late modernity. Having told the story of globalization, post-traditionalism and reflexivity, and having provided evidence that he is essentially aware of structural constraints inhibiting these developments, The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-identity both conclude with a discussion about the need for political action.1 In both works, he makes the distinction between ‘emancipatory politics’ and ‘life politics’ (1990: 156, 1991a: 209–10). This distinction lines up with the tension identified in his analysis of late modernity between the potential for a more empowered, reflexive self on one hand and the forces inhibiting its emergence on the other. Emancipatory politics is the term Giddens chooses to summarize what most scholars of politics will identify as the principal well-established struggles between the political left and right: … in all cases, the objective of emancipatory politics is either to release under-privileged groups from their unhappy condition, or to eliminate the relative differences between them …. Emancipatory politics is concerned to reduce or eliminate exploitation, inequality and oppression. (Giddens, 1991a: 211)

On 22 January 2013, comedian Alexei Sayle wrote an article in The Guardian, suggesting that 1980s ‘alternative’ comedy destroyed not only bigoted, racist, misogynistic and xenophobic humour, but also the elitist absurdity that had come to be the hallmark of Oxbridge comedy a la ‘Footlights’. Sayle ended on the idea that he was still full of hate for elitism and privilege, and singled out an episode of The Young Ones (BBC2 1982–1984) as a moment of epiphany: What I didn’t understand, despite all my years of Marxist study groups, was that every revolution contains within it the seeds of its own destruction … For me, the turning point … was the making of the Bambi episode for the second series of The Young Ones, broadcast in 1984. I turned up for the recording to find several generations of Cambridge Footlights were in the show. ‘I thought these people were the enemy!’ I railed at the writers. ‘The whole point of what we were doing was surely to challenge the smug hegemony of the Oxford, Cambridge, public-schoolboy comedy network, as well as destroying the old-school working men’s club racists!’ ‘No, that was just you,’ the writers replied. ‘We never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings. We think all these people are lovely. Stephen Fry’s made us lardy cake, Hugh Laurie’s been playing boogie-woogie piano all morning, Mel Smith’s going to take us for a ride in his gold Rolls-Royce, and Griff Rhys-Jones has been screaming abuse at minions to make us laugh.’

In April 2012 Trenton Oldfield, an Australian man in his mid-30s, disrupted the annual Boat Race between Cambridge and Oxford Universities by going for a swim in the River Thames. For some, Oldfield’s timely swim in a public space was an imaginative and well-executed act of peaceful, civil disobedience which achieved maximum exposure and caused minimal damage. Live television coverage of the event and his use of social media allowed him to promote his manifesto ‘Elitism leads to Tyranny’ with Oldfield’s actions an example of individual, autonomous political activity. This chapter considers the opportunities that a large sport event, here the Boat Race, offers to such individual autonomist protesters and how new forms of digital web-based media are changing the dynamic between sport, media and protest. The discussion focuses on response to Oldfield’s protest by sections of the English media and the UK government who, upset to see their sporting pleasures disrupted, sought to deport him from the UK.

The Education Act of 1944 (aka the Butler Act) finally provided a nationwide system of free, compulsory schooling from age five to 15, with a change of school at 11. Whilst overall a laudably progressive programme, underpinned by the principle that ‘the nature of a child’s education should be based on his capacity and promise and not by the circumstances of his parent’ (Board of Education 1943: 7), it nonetheless received considerable criticism for its continued divisiveness, firstly for sending the ‘top’ 20 per cent of children to grammar school with the ‘Eleven Plus’-failing majority consigned to local technical colleges or secondary moderns,1 but mainly for refusing to dismantle private education. Instead, the concurrent 1944 Fleming Report recommended a degree of integration by awarding up to a quarter of public school places to suitably ‘qualified’ state school children: thus began ‘assisted places’, an arguably disingenuous scheme to placate left-wing objections that public school elitism was at variance with the social cohesion created by the war and that its outdated ethos had contributed to the war’s disastrous early course (Barber 1994: 49–56). The scheme would never thrive, local authorities prioritising expenditure elsewhere, but it attracted the early attention of British stage and screen.

My title ‘pure and common Greek’ comes from the last of a series of polemics fired off by the militant Catholic, John Rastell, against John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, printed in Antwerp in 1566. On the face of it the phrase is nicely paradoxical, like the mechanicals’ ‘tedious brief scene … of very tragical mirth’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, few attainments carry a greater air of elitism about them than the ability to read classical Greek. There is certainly nothing ‘common’ about it. Virginia Woolf found the remoteness of the Greeks reassuring: ‘Fate … has preserved them from vulgarity’, she declared in The Common Reader.1 More recently, the exclusiveness of Greek helps to account for the extraordinary success of Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History, where the reader enjoys the sense of special access to the private and privileged world of the Hampden Greek class while remaining, like its narrator, an outsider. But the aura of elitism, social as well as academic, that surrounds the study of classical Greek in the English-speaking world is not something that was present from the start. In the early sixteenth century, when Greek learning was first established in England, its role was far from being purely ornamental. Indeed, like all novelties, it was viewed with suspicion by many.

In the previous chapter, the analyses of W. B. Yeats’s poetics in light of Georges Sorel’s theory of social myth explored the ways in which faith, belief, and enthusiasm as experiences engendered in the process of reading are transformed into social attitudes with consequences in the material world of action. This reading of Yeats’s aesthetics in the context of Sorel’s theory of social myth is pertinent on account of a shared faith in the evocative power of symbols which both authors see as having poetic as well as social value. Willy Gianinazzi points out that the powerful image is constitutive of Sorel’s social myth because it establishes a rapport between the world of feelings and the world of action (Gianinazzi, 2010b, p. 164). Through employing the concept of aesthetico-religious chronotope, Yeats’s poetry, in its use of a range of mythological traditions, can be seen as achieving effects that are similar to those which would be achieved through Sorel’s social myth. This argument is strengthened by the fact that both Yeats and Sorel read and valued Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, especially its emphasis on the power of sublime, poetic, and religious feeling to transform material reality into a realm of aesthetic beauty. While their interpretations of Nietzsche’s theories are similar in many respects, in Sorel’s case it led to productive qualification of Marx’s notion of social poetry (Gianinazzi, 2010b, p. 164) whereas in Yeats’s case it led to aristocratic elitism.

The preceding chapter examined the social attitudes, animosities, and perceptions that underlay pro-treaty critiques of the republican movement during the civil war. This chapter will take up the other side of the treaty split by examining the social content of anti-treaty or republican discourses in the civil war, particularly concerning how republicans viewed their opponents in the conflict. As with the pro-treaty camp, issues of nationalist legitimacy initially dominated republican discourses. From the republican perspective, former comrades who accepted the treaty were unprincipled apostates and ‘sell-outs’, the Free State itself was merely a British puppet regime, and support for the new government resulted from materialism, fear, ‘slave-mindedness’, a pro-English outlook, and weak national principles. Countering the pro-treaty camp’s rhetorical efforts to paint the anti-treaty IRA as post-truce recruits overcompensating for their earlier apathy and cowardice, republican propagandists seized on Free State recruitment of demobilized British Army soldiers, ex-RIC men, unemployed workers, and other non-Sinn Fein elements as evidence of the ‘un-Irish’ and ‘mercenary’ character of enemy forces.1 Taken together, these attitudes might appear to justify historians’ tendency to emphasize the political fundamentalism, anti-materialism, militarism, moral elitism, and revolutionary vanguardism of the anti-treaty movement.2

The Wednesday Play anthology series, transmitted on BBC1 between October 1964 and October 1970, can be defined as a landmark in British television drama: it can also, however, be defined as a male-dominated bastion of cultural elitism in which the dominant values of androcentric institutions such as the BBC were imposed upon gendered viewing formations. The following discussion continues the work of feminist culturalist television criticism in its intersection with resistance theory and response analysis by exploring the relationship between this single-play series and its specifically female audience; in particular issues such as representations of ‘woman’ and of male-female relationships in the strand will be examined, as will the mediation and interpretation of these dominant images by audiences. In reference to the writers of the plays, the discourse inscribed within male-authored texts will be counterpointed with the challenges to them in the few female-authored plays, and dialogues of dissent and resistance will be explored. The ideological issue of the positioning of the female audience as either passive receiver or active constructor of textual meaning is central to this discussion.

In 2002, John Brockman, the literary agent of numerous popular scientists, edited a collection of essays entitled The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century. Here, the intellectual importance of science is strongly stated; rather than seeing it as an alternative to advancements in the humanities, it is pitted as superior in both knowledge and creativity: ‘Science is the big news, and it is scientists who are asking the big questions. Through their books and articles they have become the new public intellectuals, leaders of a new kind of public culture’ (Brockman, 2002, p. xiii). Unlike the ‘old-style intellectual culture’ of elitism in the arts, the new culture of science is ‘transform[ing] its own premises as fast as our technologies are transforming us’ (Brockman, 2002, p. v).2

Beginning with the 1960s, Korea decisively made a break with its historical legacy of suppressing productive forces causing the persistent problems of poverty and underdevelopment. The devastating inter-Korean War, painful national division and the autocratic rule of Syungman Rhee — all made societal forces firm their resolve during the student revolution in April 1960, carving out a distinct ‘developmental determination’ that culminated in a paradigmatic shift in the nature, orientation and structure of its political economy. The popular wish of the Korean people, expressed through various protests, resentments and rebellious movements, brought about comprehensive land reforms that contributed to creating a ‘level playing field’ crucial for de-embedding agrarian elitism and embedding Minjung-influenced egalitarianism. This new egalitarianism galvanized Korea to opt for the promotion of productive forces through labor-intensive, mass-production industries. Korea’s manufacturing push contrasted with countries such as India, where capital-intensive industrialization was attempted, but which served only a small part of the population. In fact, the groundwork done by numerous protests and individual sacrifices by the common people made Korea move toward an egalitarian political economy. Unfortunately, this hard-earned egalitarianism was quickly replaced by a new type of elitism spearheaded by family-owned industrial conglomerates.

The previous chapters have been concerned primarily with the relationship between the ideology of standardization and linguistics. Here we consider standardization within the context of a more thoroughgoing analysis of the social conditions and ideological framework that arguably lie behind much current linguistic variation and change. The principal theme of this chapter will be that recent social changes have led to the creation of alternative, ostensibly egalitarian, ideologies that implicitly challenge the hierarchical model built into the conventional standard ideology. The result of this from the linguistic point of view is a degree of convergence in linguistic practice that is perhaps unparalleled in modern history. This seems to go beyond the diachronically well-attested phenomenon whereby standard languages at various points in their histories have absorbed and legitimized previously stigmatized speech patterns. Traditionally, where that has happened, the separateness of the standard vis-a-vis other varieties has continued undisturbed. The contemporary situation appears to present a different model, in which the boundary between standard and non-standard is becoming less well defined, partly, though not exclusively, because categories of speaker who previously might have been expected to be loyal stakeholders in the standard ideology increasingly forswear the elitism that such a stance embodies. We analyse this ‘anti-standardization’ process as a form of levelling, but one that operates primarily in the social rather than the geographical dimension and one that involves the global speech community associated with a given language as opposed to localized communities.

In all the countries of the West, but especially in the United States and in the United Kingdom, horse-riding is associated with elites dabbling in mythologicized country living. In the United States, the cowboy is the archetype of the white frontiersman, fighting the Native Americans (the ‘red Indians’), breaking the law (fighting the system) and smoking his cigarette (the symbol of his rugged individuality and disdain of soft folk back on the East Coast) (Fishwick, 1952). However, the myth of the cowboy has been transformed by the industrialization of ranching, the decline of the white rural working classes and the rise of equestrian vacations and clubs where elite whites can perform both the myth of the cowboy and the older elitism of colonial equestrian events associated with the old country (Ellis, 2011). Kate Dashper’s (2010, 2012) ongoing research project exploring issues of equality and power in equestrian sports shows how elitist equestrian sports and equestrian leisure activities in the United Kingdom can be.

In 2001, Jacques Rogge became the eighth president in the history of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). A day after his election, the New York Times published a column entitled ‘New Leader Represents Old Order’.1 The Times journalist heralded not only a new leader but, also, Rogge’s profound connections to previous IOC regimes and the ubiquitous networks of power and influence which had long ruled the organisation of the Olympic Games. More importantly, Rogge’s appointment assured historical continuity, a reaffirmation of the structures of meaning which had steered the Olympic idea through decades of a vastly changing political and economic landscape. Like other IOC presidents, Rogge provided continuity between the old world and the new. The IOC has been deftly striking this balance since it was formed in 1894, continuously recasting the original purposes of the Modern Olympic Games to suit the new historical circumstances that have arisen in each passing year of its existence. How else could a century-old cultural institution, rooted in intellectual and physical elitism, sustain a position of global significance in such a markedly changed world?

It is well established that migrants are overrepresented in European criminal justice systems. This is quite peculiar to countries of the European Union (EU), some countries in particular. Processes of criminalization seem to be inherently tied to immigration policies that are oriented toward exclusion, and this is especially evident in the strong connection between an individual’s lack of regular legal status and their being subject to such processes. In relation to this, the question of whether Europe is, indeed, a ‘land of immigration’ is paramount. However, one must ask: how can the public debate necessary to make the EU a genuine ‘land of immigration’ take place if there is no common, democratic European ‘public sphere’, and no space for genuine intra-European political debate? The desire for such debate is connected to the need for a common sphere of social and public interaction within the EU, the absence of which is in part attributable to the lack of a common language (a problem which is not solved by the elitism of a small cosmopolitan European leadership). In this regard, paradoxically, immigrants would be the natural candidates to join such a common European public sphere of discussion.

‘Diversity’ has become a key term in contemporary social theory, politics and practice and is often used as both a description of complex social realities and a prescription for how those realities should be valued, assessed and managed. In considering diversity in education, this collection of essays explores the relationship between new equality regimes and continued societal inequalities, exploring change, ambivalence and resistance as negotiated, lived-in and differently inhabited in and through policies, institutional practices and everyday interpersonal encounters. Legislative requirements sit alongside easy rhetorics and uneasy realities. The New Labour UK government (1997–2010) recognised and formalised six equality strands (age, disability, religion, race, sexual orientation and gender) with fresh legislation that addressed equality issues (Equality Act, 2010)1: these are negotiated at the EU level and, indeed, internationally, with a raft of recent ‘diversity’ legislation reconfiguring mainstreamed-marginalised identities. Yet these strands of equality and diversity are threatened in a climate of welfare cut-backs, economic crisis and an overhauling of higher education. As ‘diversity’ is increasingly invoked in changing educational landscapes, it is pulled in different directions: as capital, cure, caveat and check. We hear how diverse institutions can respond to tough times of educational cutbacks and economic crisis, to buffer their diverse subjects, as resilient, capacitated future-workers. These pronouncements frequently invoke a sentiment of to be ‘improved’, as a rejection of elitism via ‘internation-alisation’ and ‘widening participation’, whereby students are propelled into diverse, enhanced futures (Taylor and Allen, 2011). Diversity stories and sentiments are told despite the reality of unequal opportunities, entries and futures.

The founding fathers of the American republic had an Aristotelian moment, a subtle experience drawn generally from their aristocratic backgrounds and from the simple fact that their view of government was shaped by the need to have a system that safeguarded the individualistic values of the Protestant work ethic on the one hand, but on the other, also recognised the class-based nature of social and economic organisation. To the extent that wealth and education represent a socially elevating criterion, they were also seen as necessary for accomplishing all matters of state interest. In fundamental ways, this also could have shaped their preference for ‘representative democracy’ over ‘direct democracy’ or what they called ‘rule of the rabble’. The justification for these sentiments has persisted in the annals of American government in such a way that despite its acclaimed democratic credentials, the nation’s elites always rule both in matters of legislative policy making or in the workings of the free-market system. Even when we consider the formation and control of political parties (an essential tool for political participation and interest articulation in liberal democracies), we also find that Robert Michels’ hypothesis concerning the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ still resonates in terms of who leads American political parties and who decides what issues or policies are important or not, and in whose interest they serve. In the end, this work argues that the kind of democratic pluralism so much revered in liberal democracies serves essentially as a ‘legitimating’ force for narrow elite rule devoid of popular consent.

In recent years the challenges of globalisation have provided a new critical lens for viewing social, economic and political problems. Harry Hendrick draws a direct correlation between the rise of the social investment state and heightened concern about promoting and protecting the international competitiveness of the economy. In Britain, Hendrick notes that the New Labour government, which came to power in 1997, adopted the language and policies of social investment, thereby making children and childhood a focus of popular anxieties as well as state intervention (Hendrick 2003: 205–53). For Hendrick these emerging issues and debates served to resurrect a number of long-standing dualisms apparent in discussions about child welfare since at least the 1880s. These included children’s bodies and minds, children as victims and threats, and the identification and management of the normal and the abnormal (Hendrick 1994: 1–15). These ideas provide a backdrop for the evaluation of health visiting practices, which are the focus of this chapter. The intention is to suggest that current critiques of early twentieth-century models of health visiting, which concentrate on controlling practices and elitism among practitioners, miss the important contribution such services could make to improving child welfare.

In spring 2001, the front page of the culture section of a major national Czech newspaper, Lidove Noviny, featured an article in which a venerable Czech translator Břetislav Hodek charged his prominent colleague Martin Hilský with ‘betraying the Czech national culture’ by making Shakespeare too accessible.1 A public exchange between the two quickly ensued, joined by journalists and literary scholars who compiled textual, intellectual and ideological arguments in defence of one or the other’s more ‘true’ Shakespeare. As surprising as the public nature of this exchange might seem, Hodek was not the first to publicly challenge Hilský’s popular translations, used by an overwhelming majority of proliferating postcommunist Prague Shakespeare productions. A year earlier, an eminent theatre journal, Svět a Divadlo (SAD), serially published an unfolding exchange between Hilský and a respected theatre critic and translator of contemporary literature, Jitka Sloupova. Sloupova had objected to Hilský’s translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the grounds of excessive elitism, which reportedly presented Shakespeare as ‘a sphinx understandable only to the chosen few’ (Sloupova, 2001: 161). Though seemingly on the opposite ends of the spectrum of ‘elitism’ — one arguing that Hilský’s work is too accessible to the general populace, the other that it is not accessible enough — both Hodek and Sloupova presented a united front in suggesting that Hilský’s understanding of Shakespeare exhibited grievous flaws that needed to be exposed to public scrutiny in the interests of the intellectual and cultural health of the post-communist Czech nation.

It is now forty years since Wilensky (1964) raised the prospect of ‘The Professionalization of Everyone’ in the American Journal of Sociology. In this time, the professions have been variously seen as an economic and moral cornerstone of contemporary societies (Parsons, 1954; Durkheim, 1957), as bastions of elitism and monopoly power (Freidson, 1970; Johnson, 1972) and, more recently, a self-disciplinary form of governance exerted over expert labour (Fournier, 1999; Anderson- Gough et al., 2000). The rapid expansion of numerous forms of expert labour aspiring to professional status seems in many senses to confirm Wilensky’s prediction, even if this is at times at the expense of the ‘established’ professions. Almost 400 UK-based ‘professional associations’ were identified in a recent report (Perren, 2000), ranging from physiologists to horticulturalists to careers guidance counsellors, such that around 7 million, or 27%, of the UK working population are now identified as professionals or associate professionals (ONS, 2004) – up from around 5 million and 20% in 1998. Many of these ‘professionals’ work outside of the traditional liberal professions, either occupying a ‘para-professional’ role in the same sector, or forming part of the growing mass of organisational and entrepreneurial professionals (Larson, 1977; Reed, 1996).

This book began as a desire to marry what I perceive as the enormously rich metaphysical dimension of many modernist novels with the pragmatic theory of Gilles Deleuze, both in terms of his individual work and his collaborations with Felix Guattari. It was an impulse motivated by two salient impressions: of the visible gap in literary criticism of — especially close — Deleuze-Guattarian readings of modernism, and the sense that their theoretical pragmatics can illuminate aspects of the literature that traditional criticism has been largely unable to do. Deleuze has often been seen as practising a dubious form of aesthetic elitism that focuses exclusively on a select group of largely male writers and champions an inaccessible vision of the auteur. If the discourse of the latter half of the last century was partly defined as a (postmodernist) attack on the elitist and privatised spirit of high modernism, then Deleuze’s insistence on the importance of style in literature and writers could be classified as a rather obstinate anachronistic perpetuation of that spirit.1

As an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham I studied state theory: pluralism, elitism and Marxism. We learnt that pluralism was ‘deeply problematic’ (Marsh 2002) because it simplistically claimed that the state was a neutral arbiter of different interests. Elitism focused on the ways in which the state was dominated by different elites, but problematically the theory did not always condemn this domination. We spent a lot of time on different Marxist positions, which ranged from seeing the state as the instrument of the ruling class to exploring its political autonomy.

Fredric Jameson’s star rose in the late 1980s when theorists located within the discipline of cultural studies latched onto his essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. This essay became a guiding text for what was perceived as a new epoch. It appeared at a moment when epochalism was rife, and its proclamation of so many endings, and definitions were eagerly sought. The essay claimed to outline this new stage of world history and world culture, dependent on a new scenario in world economics. ‘Postmodernism…’ did not just define a new scene: it was taken as a certain conferment of legitimisation to the new postmodern epoch, tantamount to a justification. Now named and outlined, the new epoch could be lived and affirmed. There was no going back — going back was understood to be a return to ‘modern’ concepts, which were bound up with ‘old style’ Marxist politics and economics and high art elitism, and these two seemingly opposite principles were cast aside as co-dependents in an old, excessively hierarchical world. Despite its critical animus and stance towards the new postmodern world, the essay attested to postmodemity’s existence — if negatively. It became its map. The map turned into a gazetteer. It inflated and became a baggy book of encounters with contemporary culture, which attempted to ‘cognitively map’ comprehensively the era of multinational late capitalism.

The previous chapter examined the backgrounds of the founding generation of Council and Chatham House leaders, establishing their scientific outlook, liberal internationalism, elitism, religiosity and Anglo-Saxonism. This chapter aims concretely to establish that, despite official disclaimers, Chatham House had an enduring de facto institutional policy or ‘line’ that constituted the basis of the Institute’s attempts to ‘influence’ the making of official British foreign policy. Secondly, the chapter introduces the principal mechanisms through which Chatham House attempted to influence official policy. Chatham House was actively mobilised during the Second World War and several leading figures were placed at the heart of the making of British foreign policy with the potential to influence and to implement official policy. The chapter considers the policy-related influence of Chatham House first by outlining the activities of key individuals and of two specific arms of the organisation (Foreign Research and Press Service and the Institute of Pacific Relations’ work). Secondly, it considers the Institute’s influence by examining its role in the making of ‘key decisions’ that moved British policy closer to that of the United States and away from traditional ideas about the central importance of the British Empire.

For many contemporary students of society and culture, certain thinkers are regarded as being somewhat beyond the pale, their work embodying wholly outmoded views and assumptions. It would be best, it is sometimes thought, if such authors and all their works were to be quietly condemned to the dustbin of history. One such figure is the German philosopher and sociologist, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno is often represented as the supreme example of aristocratic elitism, gazing down from above with a lofty contempt for all matters ‘popular’. So much so has this view of Adorno become an orthodoxy in academic circles in recent years that his very name has become a by-word for a cultural elitism that seems to be the epitome of modernist arrogance and hubris (see e.g. Fiske, 1989, p. 183). In the brave new post-modernist world in which we are purportedly living, it seems that the only lesson Adorno can teach us is to show how cultural analysis should not be done.

Elitism has a firm place historically, structurally and procedurally in the African National Congress (ANC), the country’s leading nationalist party. In its formative years between the two world wars, the party leadership, according to McKinley, ‘rejected organising amongst the mass of Africans’.1 When a so-called national defiance campaign was embarked upon in the early 1950s, ‘little effort was made’ to mobilize the black urban working class, though they represented the most readily organized section of the people. A key aspect of the action, moreover, was for protesters to court arrest through public acts of civil disobedience, a step which many ordinary workers simply could not afford to emulate. The party leadership, he believes, ‘recoiled from mass mobilisation’.2

While all established democracies today are located within capitalist systems, not all democracies, now or earlier, are or were the same. In liberal (or representative or electoral or elite) democracy, the predominant form of the twenty-first century, it is hard to address inequalities and poverty as issues demanding attention. Where that system is associated with laissez-faire capitalism, as is usually the case, it is more difficult still. The United States is the leading liberal polity, and it is the home, and global progenitor, of an extensively deregulated market economy. This new flexible capitalism creates inequalities and injustice which the liberal polity, with its largely alienated, non-participatory electorate, is unable to address. The richest liberal capitalism is also the most inequitable in the advanced capitalist world, where injustice is the lot of the proliferating underclasses of blacks, Hispanics and poor whites.1 Other contemporary democracies, such as social democracy in Western Europe, have notably lower levels of inequality and fewer people in poverty. Participatory democratic forms, in actuality in Athens 508–322 BC, and in the mass movement in South Africa in the 1970s–80s, were significantly different again. But the ascendant American liberal capitalism threatens both its own citizens and more egalitarian systems elsewhere. The evidence suggests that where deregulation, flexibility and downsizing are uncritically embraced, the quest for equality and justice is abandoned. A large helot underclass has been ‘ballooning’ in the United States, ‘disciplined by fear and scarcity, [and] subject to endless surveillance’.2

Sun’s energies from 1906 until 1918 were largely expended on his political activities. In 1907 he fled to Annam as the Manchu government had pressured the Japanese government to expel him; and in this year there were also abortive revolutionary attempts in Chaochow, Waichow, Yamchow and Limchow. In 1908 Sun went to the United States on a financial campaign, and in 1910 he travelled to Siam and the Straits Settlements. Throughout this time he was overseeing the opening of branches of the T’ung Meng-Hui in China, Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe.

In the eyes of those Britons who, in the age of Empire, were to an extent aware of — and, more relevantly, were actors in — imperial administration, and in the minds of most young men who had already set their sights on a career in administration overseas, the Indian Civil Service enjoyed pre-eminence in the ranking order. ‘The Civil Service of Pakistan is the successor in Pakistan of the Indian Civil Service’, proclaimed an official recruiting pamphlet in Karachi a few years after independence, ‘which was the most distinguished Civil Service in the world.’1 Half a century later, in advertising a retrospective memoir on the Sudan Political Service, the publisher found no difficulty in situating the topic for a possibly disoriented post-imperial readership by the reminder that the SPS ‘was of a renown comparable with that of the Indian Civil Service’.2 In between, too, Indian members of the former ICS have not hesitated in their claim that the District Officer was hand-picked for the most prized of all Britain’s imperial civil services.3 Nor, expectedly, have the former British members of the ICS, recording their memoirs of what by definition must be among the last of first-hand accounts, been slow to praise.4 In the intervening fifty years, as research has deepened into who Britain’s once-upon-a-time imperial administrators were and why they opted for that kind of overseas career, the evidence has hardened that among these aspirant Crown career graduates — and often their families — there existed in the opening decades of the twentieth century, unofficially yet palpably perceived, a preferred hierarchy in the status of Britain’s overseas civil services. The existence of that ranking is aptly condensed in the common graduate response of the time, still recalled in memoir, that ‘I didn’t think I stood a chance for the ICS, so I applied for the Sudan Political’ or ‘I wrote down the Colonial Service as my second choice — and got in’. Uniqueness may be unquantifiable, but in elitism gradations can comfortably coexist.

The image of Virginia Woolf as a writer divorced from the public realm continues to surface, and Quentin Bell’s representation of Woolf as ‘terrified of the world, terrified of exposing herself’ remains current in the public domain.1 Woolf’s supposed ivory tower elitism, her pathological privacy, and the protective, self-perpetuating shell of the Bloomsbury Group are all important constituent parts of this image of an asexual, apolitical Woolf writing for and about a cosy coterie.

Readers usually consider Felix Holt one of George Eliot’s less successful novels, not so bad as Romola, but not nearly so good as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, or Middlemarch. Its elitism, sentimentality, nostalgia, inconsistency, and excessive idealization of the main character usually take the blame for the inferiority. Elsewhere, I have argued that its confusing politics, a mixture of the Wollstonecraftianism of Mrs Transome’s plot and the Burkean gradualism of Felix’s, help account for the failure. But the conflict between expressed and implied attitudes toward metaphor, as indicated in various aspects of the intoxicant complex, also creates disturbing disjunctions. More obviously than the fiction, the companion ‘Address to Working Men by Felix Holt’ also loses effectiveness because its persona offers only metaphorical solutions to social problems. Felix the essayist falls into a practice he objects to as the youthful protagonist of the fictional work.

According to Harold Bloom in his curiously pyrrhic victory of literary elitism, the aesthetic is uncontaminated with the ideological.1 One gathers that the ideological forms a low diet which can be fed to the troglodytes of cultural studies while the politics-free zone of high culture can be left to the initiated. (Curiously, he has some glowing pages on Persuasion which persuade us to share a sense of Persuasion’s ‘extraordinary aesthetic distinction’ (p. 254), a judgement which nothing that follows is intended to diminish or demean.)

Elitism in disabled sport is still a relatively new concept. Many people in both the sporting and academic worlds do not fully understand the changes disabled sport has gone through in the last fifty years in moving from a method of medical rehabilitation to truly competitive sport. Over this period of time Adapted Physical Education and Adapted Physical Activities have increased in popularity as academic subjects within Further and Higher Education, but they have only tended to portray sport for disabled people from one of its distinct angles — the mostly non-competitive participation level. The elite end of the spectrum has been given little exposure academically. This is particularly so for women athletes. In track and road racing improved methods of training and technology have all contributed to new levels of achievement in disabled sport, where an extensive international competitive circuit exists alongside Paralympic and World Championship Competition (Banks 1992). Since wheelchair racing first developed in the 1950s, it is now a suitable time in the development of the sport for the changes that are occurring to be tracked, so that sport can be further developed for the future for all levels of ability. As a consequence of my being awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship, I was able, in 1993, to investigate wheelchair track and road racing in Australia.

The desire to look better — clothed or unclothed — is a prime motivating factor behind the expanding aerobics phenomenon. After years of complaining about any dance class which began before 9.00 a.m., I took to my local fitness club at the unheard-of hour (for me) of 6.30 a.m. to obtain first-hand knowledge of my object of study. Fortunately, benefits have been increased lung capacity and looser-fitting clothes. A performance-dance background and education in American and English higher education institutions left me with a degree of elitism towards the fitness trend. However, the growing diversity and availability of aerobic exercise classes and increasingly, aerobic dance classes, challenged my initial reductionist metaphor of aerobics in the city essentialised by a step-aerobics class. Densely-packed classes, with platforms at various heights corresponding to an urban landscape of skyscrapers, sweating bodies responding to shouted commands in a seemingly automaton fashion — such images are bound in more complex relationships between aerobics, dance, urban (and suburban) life and the individual.

I do not want to get sidetracked by the issue of elitism, but I think it is helpful to begin with Professor Hick’s remarks on this topic.

Almost all the ideas which were to be influential in the first eight years of the Kibbo Kift had been present since its inception. As in other social movements, during such formative periods, the influence of particular individuals or groups had proved decisive in crystallising certain strands and providing impetus for particular courses of action. The departure of the Co-operators made the tasks faced by the movement both simpler and more difficult. Undoubtedly, now that the struggle for internal supremacy was over, the formulation of an agreed definition of problems and a shared interpretation of reality was made more straightforward. The response which that reality demanded was also uncontentious: it was the continuing development of the Kibbo Kift itself as an elite organisation. Problematically, however, that response could not now call upon the financial and other resources which the Cooperators had offered. For supporters who remained loyal to the Kindred two pressing questions remained: how was their claim to elite status to be established and validated, and if validated, to what purpose was their elitism to be directed?

This chapter summarizes and integrates some of the major, specific, and general conclusions drawn from the 20 substantive content chapters in this book. These findings relate to the subjects of authoritarianism, nationalism, political education and socialization, democratization, human rights, stereotyping, elitism, citizenship, anti-Semitism, intolerance, and internationalization or Europeanization. These various contributions make a unique combination of significant findings. This is not possible using a more narrow focus on national or regional (rather than comparative and cross-national) perspectives on these important topics which we discussed and which are of such significant interest today.

In 1946 the young Raymond Williams was ‘fired by his experience of educational work with the chaps in Germany and by what he had heard of the WEA’.1 His work on his return to student life in 1945 was viewed as ‘impressive’2 by his tutors and had crystallised and focused his new maturity. Cambridge English, and Leavis in particular, considered by Williams in his prewar student days ’ a bourgeois cult’,3 was now a major inspiration given Williams’s dissatisfaction with the mechanical, reductive Marxism of the period as a weapon of literary and cultural analysis. He found the cultural radicalism of Leavis immensely compelling and ‘there was the discovery of practical criticism. That was intoxicating’.4 If one problem with the Scrutiny school, for Williams’s generation, was its elitism and its dissolution of politics, this was not all -pervasive and what many found attractive was its powerful emphasis on a radical transformation in education. As L. C. Knights put it: Our educational programme has been conceived from the first in terms of a radical criticism of existing society, including we may say its economic and social ordering. It is precisely by unfitting his pupils for the environment that the educator can hope to change it and to change it more radically than if he concentrates on political issues alone.5

Virtually everyone who has an interest in Russia would now readily concede that Soviet society possesses an easily recognisable elite. This fact was not always widely appreciated. The existence of elitism in a rigorously ‘socialist’ society was for decades carefully concealed in official pronouncement. And so loud was the blare of Marxist-Leninist propaganda, so inaccessible was Soviet society to objective study, that many people in the West were inclined to accept, in large measure, Soviet protestations of egalitarianism. Indeed, such was the lack of awareness of the phenomenon that Milovan Djilas’s interesting, though unoriginal, book on the so-called ‘new class’, created something of a sensation when it appeared in 1957.

For decades several arguments with which Yugoslav feminists are concerned seem to have remained unchanged. It seems that right- and left-oriented critics of feminist efforts throughout this century have continually criticised their elitism, both sides characterising it as a drawback rather than an advantage.