- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Allen Lane; 1st Edition edition (7 Sep 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0713993170
- ISBN-13: 978-0713993172
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.6 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 182,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Amazon.co.uk Review
George Walden's The New Elites begins with a number of assumptions; first, that elites are defensible and desirable provided they are open; second, that Britain is a country where populist elites have never been more powerful or ubiquitous; and finally, that these new elites are more difficult to spot because our thinking about elites and masses remains congealed in Left/Right configurations. As befits a polymath and Cambridge scholar, Walden demonstrates his wide reading but, for a former Conservative Member of Parliament, he draws on some surprising sources for his sparkling political and cultural analysis: perhaps less incongruously from the Machiavellians Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Gaetano Mosca, but the self-confessed "anti-politician" who was not afraid to tell Tory grandees to bugger off also loses a few more friends at the Reform Club by employing those sainted elders of left-thinking intellectuals Antonio Gramsci and Hannah Arendt to hold a looking-glass up to Britannia.
Inevitably, one of the shortcomings of this ambitious book is that it covers too much ground too quickly. If the emergence of this new class is a genuine phenomenon--and Walden's argument certainly feels right in many ways--then it needs more than anecdotal support to bring it into convincing focus. But the real gold to be mined in Walden's slice through British cultural life is the searching and piquant questions he brings out into the open and the suggestiveness of the answers. If each age creates its own distinctive elites, in a populist democracy, what will ours look like? Does it make sense to think of "the masses" in terms of the social underdog? Ultimately, although intellectuals will no doubt tut at its breezy polemic, The New Elites is an educated, persuasive critique of the outworn political and sociological categorisations with which we think about "democracy", and "culture". This is a short, sharp, invigorating read , pithy, wise and irreverent in all the right places. Supporters of the Dome, Brit-art and Princess Diana prepare to be offended. --Larry Brown
Andrew Marr, Telegraph
'You have to read it.'
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Walden chases the zeitgeist,
By A Customer
This review is from: The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses (Paperback)
For a man of mature years whose once luxurious locks now receding into distant memory, George Walden certainly had his finger on the pulse when he wrote his latest book, The New Elites. An incisive critique of Blairite Britain, the work succeeds in illustrating the connections between Blair's shabby populism and middle class vacuity more generally. An unexpected fan of the Simpsons, Walden sometimes comes across rather like his hero Bart, thumbing his nose at the new establishment and inviting them to "eat my shorts". Speaking as someone who has seen Walden in shorts, I would venture that this would be no bad thing. Joking aside, and Walden's book is full of good jokes, there is a serious message in the book which goes to the heart of the British democratic process... Walden points out that one explanation for the rise of soundbite politics is that the balance of power between politics, commerce and the media has so shifted as to leave the politician effectively sidelined from the real mechanisms of power. Media and commerce coexist in a rather grimy adulterous relationship, and political culture has beome a parody of what it once was, an apparently healthy husk, but with nothing of substance inside.
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Do As I Say Not As I Do...?,
By Byron Cryostat "cultofbyron" (Cross Hills, North Yorkshire, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: New Elites: A Career in the Masses (Paperback)
To expand upon the title of my review, it seems that George Walden has many honourable ideas about the state of contemporary English culture (at least the culture that is propagated through mass media), however, this book seems to fall into a kind of trap that he himself has set. The idea that our society is run by a new kind of elite, one which is different from older elites in that it is not constituted (with some major exceptions) by hereditary peers or the 'old-boys network' is a valid and interesting one. Walden's book, as the Amazon review points out, is perhaps a little too shallow in its approbation of the new elites though, to warrant regarding it as worthy and substantial cultural critique. One wonders if Walden isn't in fact a victim of Al Gore syndrome, one whose ability to change that which he rails against is only realised when he is no longer in a position to change it... Walden was Higher Education secretary under Thatcher in the mid-80's (Yes, THAT Thatcher government, that in the long run did so much to enrich our cultural lives).
On the whole what lets this book down are anecdotes and sweeping gestures which contradict previous moments of genuine insight, not to mention moments of genuine concern: Walden rejects the entire body-of-work of cultural theorist Raymond Williams on the grounds that he was once a supporter of Stalin, posturing Williams canon as 'conditioned by his left-wing politics' p61. What, exactly are your politics, Mr Walden, or are you immune from cultural conditioning...? It would be in bad taste therefore to similarly reject wholesale Walden's ideas, it is just worth bearing in mind that there seem to be better written, more thorough treatise on the subject of cultural quality and the constitution of our society. Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' leaps into mind. Another alarming moment, blink and you'll miss it, is suggesting that authors such as J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Tim Parks and Penelope Fitzgerald having 'humanitarian' beliefs is forgivable... So to sum up, Walden goes for the jugular of both easy targets and those who probably don't care less about his flimsy criticism of them. I would challenge the author to use his retirement to better effect, if he considers his ideas worthy of publication, and produce a less polemic, more focussed and objective critique of contemporary culture. Perhaps he will come up with a belter, perhaps it will actually bring about some changes, at the very least it would be a worthy addition to the growing canon of ideas around the current malaise.
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
possibly THE BEST diagnosis of contemporary British politics,
By
This review is from: New Elites: A Career in the Masses (Paperback)
I see this has been re-published with the beeming face of Mr Cameron on the front. It is a timely reissuing as he is the perhaps an even purer distilation of the trends Walden describes than Blair was (is?). I was disappointed by Walden's Time to Emigrate? as it is an occasionally meanspirted intervention into the immigration debate, whereas this is a slim volume of ideas which attempts (in the best possible sense of the word) to capture the zietgiest.
He defines the new labour 'project' (urgh..) to be that of a populist-oligarchy - run by a privaledged elite who fail to fufill the good functions thier caste have fufilled in the past (raising tastes, stability) and instead affect populist men-of-the-people airs. This affection, this lets-all-read-the-laff is responsible for low aspirations - a stifling mediocrity Walden illustrates through the Dome-As-Metaphor, a structure with no rough edges, boringly inclusive... It is a work of political and cultural criticism. The aforementioned Time to Emigrate does indeed update his narrative to encompass the emergence of Cameron. That book is best read after absorbing the full import of Walden's thesis as communicated in here.
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