Notes Towards The Definition Of Culture, Chapter 2: The Class and the Elite

It would appear, according to the account of levels of culture put forward in the previous chapter, that among the more primitive societies, the higher types exhibit more marked differentiations of function amongst their members than the lower types. At a higher stage still, we find that some functions are more honoured than others, and this division promotes the development of classes, in which higher honour and higher privilege are accorded, not merely to the person as functionary but as member of the class. And the class itself possesses a function, that of maintaining that part of the total culture of the society which pertains to that class. We have to try to keep in mind, that in a healthy society this maintenance of a particular level of culture is to the benefit, not merely of the class which maintains it, but of the society as a whole. Awareness of this fact will prevent us from supposing that the culture of a ‘higher’ class is something superfluous to society as a whole, or to the majority, and from supposing that it is something which ought to be shared equally by all other classes. It should also remind the ‘higher’ class, in so far as any such exists, that the survival of the culture in which it is particularly interested is dependent upon the health of the culture of the people.

It has now become a commonplace of contemporary thinking, that a society thus articulated is not the highest type to which we may aspire; but that it is indeed in the nature of things for a progressive society eventually to overcome these divisions, and that it is also within the power of our conscious direction, and therefore a duty incumbent upon us, to bring about a classless society. But while it is generally supposed that class, in any sense which maintains associations of the past, will disappear, it is now the opinion of some of the most advanced minds that some qualitative differences between individuals must still be recognised, and that the superior individuals must be formed into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours. Those groups, formed of individuals apt for powers of government and administration, will direct the public life of the nation; the individuals composing them will be spoken of as ‘leaders’. There will be groups concerned with art, and groups concerned with science, and groups concerned with philosophy, as well as groups consisting of men of action: and these groups are what we call elites.

It is obvious, that while in the present state of society there is found the volutary association of like-minded individuals, and association based upon common material interest, or common occupation or profession, the elites of the future will differ in one important respect from any that we know: they will replace the classes of the past, whose positive functions they will assume. This transformation is not always explicitly stated. There are some philosophers who regard class divisions as intolerable, and others who regard them merely as moribund. The latter may simply ignore class, in their design for an elite-governed society, and say that the elites will ‘be drawn from all sections of society’. But it would seem that as we perfect the means for identifying at an early age, educating for their future role, and settling into positions of authority, the individuals who will form the Elites, all former class distinctions will become a mere shadow or vestige, and the only social distinction of rank will be between the dikes and the rest of the community, unless, as may happen, there is to be an order of precedence and prestige amongst the several elites themselves.

However moderately and unobtrusively the doctrine of elites is put, it implies a radical transformation of society. Superficially, it appears to aim at no more than what we must all desire — that all positions in society should be occupied by those who are best fitted to exercise the functions of the positions. We have all observed individuals occupying situations in life for which neither their character nor their intellect qualified them, and so placed only through nominal education, or birth or consanguinity. No honest man is vexed by such a spectacle. But the doctrine of elites implies a good deal more than the rectification of such injustice. It posits an atomic view of society.

The philosopher whose views on the subject of elites deserve the closest attention, both for their own value and because of the influence they exert, is the late Dr. Karl Mannheim. It is, for that matter. Dr. Mannheim who has founded the fortunes, in this country, of the term dike. I must remark that Dr. Mannheim’s description of culture is different from that given in the previous chapter of this essay. He says {Man and Society, p. 81):

A sociological investigation of culture in liberal society must begin with the life of those who create culture, i.e. the intelligentsia and their position within society as a whole.

According to the account which I have given, a ‘culture’ is conceived as the creation of the society as a whole: being, from another aspect, that which makes it a society. It is not the creation of any one part of that society. The function of what Dr. Mannheim would call the culture-creating groups, according to my account, would be rather to bring about a further development of the culture in organic complexity: culture at a more conscious level, but still the same culture. This higher level of culture must be thought of both as valuable in itself, and as enriching of the lower levels: thus the movement of culture would proceed in a kind of cycle, each class nourishing the others. This is, already, a difference of some importance. My next observation is that Dr. Mannheim is concerned rather with elites than with an elite.

We may distinguish (he says, in Man and Society, p. 82) the following types of Elites: the political, the organising, the intellectual, the artistic, the moral and the religious. Whereas the political and organising elites aim at integrating a great number of individual wills, it is the function of the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral-religious elites to sublimate those psychic energies which society, in the daily struggle for existence, does not fully exhaust.

This departmentalisation of elites already exists, to some extent, and to some extent it is a necessary and a good thing. But, so far as it can be observed to exist, it is not altogether a good thing. I have suggested elsewhere that a growing weakness of our culture ha$ been the increasing isolation of elites from each other, so that the political, the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, are separated to the great loss of each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general circulation of ideas, but through the lack of those contacts and mutual influences at a less conscious level, which are perhaps even more important than ideas. The problem of the formation, preservation and development of the elites is therefore also the problem of the formation, preservation and development of the elite, a problem upon which Dr. Mannheim does not touch.

As an introduction to this problem, I must draw attention to another difference between my view and that of Dr. Mannheim. He observes, in a passage which I think contains a profound truth (p. 85 ) :

The crisis of culture in liberal-democratic society is due, in the first place, to the fact that the fundamental social processes, which previously favoured the development of the culturally creative elites, now have the opposite effect, i.e. have become obstacles to the forming of (Elites because wider sections of the population take an active part in cultural activities.

I cannot, of course, admit the last clause of this sentence as it stands. According to my view of culture, the whole of the population should ‘take an active part in cultural activities’— not all in the same activities or on the same level. What this clause means, in my terms, is that an increasing proportion of the population is concerned with group culture. This comes about, I think Dr. Mannheim would agree, through the gradual alteration of the class-structure. But at this point it seems to me that Dr. Mannheim begins to confuse elite with class. For he says (p. 89):

If one calls to mind the essential forms of selecting elites which up to the present have appeared on the historical scene, three principles can be distinguished: selection on the basis of blood, property and achievement. Aristocratic society, especially after it had entrenched itself, chose its ehtes primarily on the blood principle. Bourgeois society gradually introduced, as a supplement, the principle of wealth, a principle which also obtained for the intellectual elite, inasmuch as education was more or less available only to the offspring of the well-to-do. It is, of course, true that the principle of achievement was combined with the two other principles in earlier periods, but it is the important contribution of modern democracy as long as it is rigorous, that the achievement principle increasingly tends to become the criterion of social success.

I am ready to accept, in a rough and ready way, this account of three historical periods. But I would remark that we are here not concerned with Elites but with classes or, more precisely, with the evolution from a class to a classless society. It seems to me that at the stage of the sharpest division into classes we can distinguish an elite also. Are we to believe that the artists of the middle ages were all men of noble rank, or that the hierarchy and the statesmen were all selected according to their pedigrees?

I do not think that this is what Dr. Mannheim wishes us to believe but I think that he is confusing the elites with the dominant section of society which the elites served, from which they took their colour, and into which some of their individual members were recruited. The general scheme of the transition of society, in the last five hundred years or so, is usually accepted, and I have no interest in questioning it. I would only propose one qualification. At the stage of dominance of bourgeois society (I think it would be better to say, for this country, ‘upper middle class society’) there is a difference applying particularly to England. However powerful it was — for its power is now commonly said to be passing — it would not have been what it was, without the existence of a class above it, from which it drew some of its ideals and some of its criteria, and to the condition of which its more ambitious members aspired. This gives it a difference in kind from the aristocratic society which preceded it, and from the mass-society which is expected to follow it.

I now come to another passage in Dr. Mannheim’s discussion, which seems to me profoundly true. His intellectual integrity prevents him from dissimulating the gloom of our present position^ but he succeeds, so far as I can judge, in communicating to most of his readers a feeling of active hopefulness, by infecting them with his own passionate faith in the possibilities of ‘planning’. Yet he says quite clearly;

We have no clear idea how the selection of elites would work in an open mass society in which only the principle of achievement mattered. It is possible that in such a society, the succession of the elites would take place much too rapidly and social continuity which is essentially due to the slow and gradual broadening of the influence of the dominant groups would be lacking in it.

This raises a problem of the first importance to my present discussion, with which I do not think Dr. Mannheim has dealt in any detail: that of the transmission of culture.

When we are concerned with the history of certain parts of culture, such as the history of art, or of literature, or of philosophy, we naturally isolate a particular class of phenomena; though there has been a movement, which has produced books of interest and value, to relate these subjects more closely to a general social history. But even such, accounts are usually only the history of one class of phenomena interpreted in the light of the history of another class of phenomena and, like that of Dr. Mannheim, tend to take a more limited view of culture than that adopted here.

What we have to consider is the parts played by the elite and by the class in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.

We must remind ourselves of the danger, mentioned in the previous chapter, of identifying culture with the sum of distinct cultural activities and if we avoid this identification we shall also decline to identify our group culture with the sum of the activities of Dr. Mannheim’s elites. The anthropologist may study the social system, the economics, the arts, and the religion of a particular tribe, he may even study their psychological peculiarities: but it is not merely by observing in detail all of these manifestations, and grasping them together, that he will approach to an understanding of the culture. For to understand the culture is to understand the people, and this means an imaginative understanding. Such understanding can never be complete; either it is abstract — and the essence escapes — or else it is lived-, and in so far as it is lived, the student will tend to identify himself so completely with the people whom he studies, that he will lose the point of view from which it was worthwhile and possible to study it. Understanding involves an area more extensive than that of which one can be conscious; one cannot be outside and inside at the same time. What we ordinarily mean by understanding of another people, of course, is an approximation towards understanding which stops short at the point at which the student would begin to lose some essential of his own culture. The man who, in order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has partaken of the practice of cannibalism, has probably gone too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again.

I have raised this question, however, solely in support of my contention that culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life. Now the specialist of genius, who may be fully qualified on the ground of his vocational attainment for membership of one of Dr. Mannheim’s elites, may very well not be one of the ‘cultured persons’ representative of group culture. As I have said before, he may be only a highly valued contributor to it. Yet group culture, as observable in the past, has never been coextensive with class, whether an aristocracy or an upper middle class. A large number of members of these classes always have conspicuously deficient in ‘culture’. I think that the repository of this culture has been the elite, the major part of which was drawn from the dominant class of the time, constituting the primary consumers of the work thought and art produced by the minority members, who will have originated from various classes, including the dominant class itself. The units of this majority will, some of them, will be individuals, others will be families. But the individuals of the dominant class who compose the nucleus of the cultural elite must not thereby be cut off from the class to which they belong, for without their membership of that class they would not have their part to play. It is their function, in relation to the producers, to transmit the culture which ‘they have inherited’ just as it is their function, in relation to the rest of their class, to keep it from ossification. It is the function of the class a a whole to preserve and communicate standards of manners — which are a vital element in growing culture. It is the function of the superior members and superior families to preserve the group culture, as it is the function of the producers to alter it.

In an elite composed of individuals who find their way into it solely for their individual pre-eminence, the differences Of background will be so great, that they will be united only by their common interests, and separated by everything else. An elite must therefore be attached to some class whether higher or lower: but so long as there are classes at all it is likely to be the dominant class that attracts this elite to itself. What would happen in a classless society — which is much more difficult to envisage than people think — brings us into the area of conjecture. There are, however, some guesses which seem to me worth venturing.

The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family: no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly surpasses the degree, of culture which he acquired from his early environment. It would not do to suggest that this can be the only channel of transmission: in a society of any complexity it is supplemented and continued by other conduits of tradition. Even in relatively primitive societies this is so. In more civilised communities of specialised activities, in which not all the sons would follow the occupation of their father, the apprentice (ideally, at least) did not merely serve his master, and did not merely learn from him as one would learn at a technical school — he became assimilated into a way of life which went with that particular trade or craft and perhaps the lost secret of the craft is this, that not merely a skill but an entire way of life was transmitted. Culture — distinguishable from knowledge about culture — was transmitted by the older universities: young men have profited there who have been profitless students, and who have acquired no taste for learning, or for Gothic architecture, or for college ritual and form. I suppose that something of the same sort is transmitted also by societies of the masonic type: for initiation is an introduction into a way of life, of however restricted viability, received from the past and to be perpetuated in the future. But by far the most important channel of transmission of culture remains the family: and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate. Now the family is an institution of which nearly everybody speaks well: but it is advisable to remember that this is a term that may vary in extension. In the present age it means little more than the living members. Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an advertisement depicts a large family or three generations: the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents and one or two young children. What is held up for admiration is not devotion to a family, but personal affection between the members of it: and the smaller the family, the more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalised. But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote. Unless this reverence for past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community. Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programmes.

I should say then that in a vigorous society there will be visible both class and elite, with some overlapping and constant interaction between them. An elite, if it is a governing elite, and so far as the natural impulse to pass on to one’s offspring both power and prestige is not artificially checked, will tend to establish itself as a class — it is this metamorphosis, I think, which leads to what appears to me an oversight on the part of Dr. Mannheim. But an elite which thus transforms itself tends to lose its function as elite, for the qualities by which the original members won their position, will not all be transmitted equally to their descendants. On the other hand, we have to consider what would be the consequence when the converse took place, and we had a society in which the functions of class were assumed by elites. Dr. Mannheim seems to have believed that this will happen; he showed himself, as a passage which I have quoted shows, aware of the dangers; and he does not appear to have been ready to propose definite safeguards against them.

The situation of a society without classes, and dominated exclusively by elites is, I submit, one about which we have no reliable evidence. By such a society, I suppose we must mean one in which every individual starts without advantage or handicap; and in which, by some mechanism set up by the best designers of such machinery, everybody will find his way, or be directed, to that station of life which he is best fitted to fill, and every position will be occupied by the man or woman best fitted for it. Of course, not even the most sanguine would expect the system to work as well as that: if, by and large, it seemed to come nearer to putting the right people in the right places than any previous system, we should all be satisfied. When I say ‘dominated’, rather than ‘governed’ by elites, I mean that such a society must not be content to be governed by the right people: it must see that the ablest artists and architects rise to the top, influence taste, and execute the important public commissions; it must do the same by the other arts and by science; and above all, perhaps, it must be such that the ablest minds will find expression in speculative thought. The system must not only do all this for society in a particular situation — it must go on doing it, generation after generation. It would be folly to deny that in a particular phase of a country’s development, and for a limited purpose, an elite can do a very good job. It may, by expelling a previous governing group, which in contrast to itself may be a class, save or reform or revitalise the national life. Such things have happened. But we have very little evidence about the perpetuation of government by elite, and such as we have is unsatisfactory. A considerable time must elapse before we can draw any illustration from Russia. Russia is a rude and vigorous country; it is also a very big country; and it will need a long period of peace and internal development. Three things may happen. Russia may show us how a stable government and a flourishing culture can be transmitted only through elites; it may lapse into oriental lethargy; or the governing elite may follow the course of other governing elites and become a governing class. Nor can we rely upon any evidence from the United States of America. The real revolution in that country was not what is called the Revolution in the history books, but is a consequence of the Civil War; after which arose a plutocratic elite; after which the expansion and material development of the country was accelerated; after which was swollen that stream of mixed immigration, bringing (or rather multiplying) the danger of development into a caste system which has not yet been quite dispelled. For the sociologist, the evidence from America is not yet ripe. Our other evidence for government by elite comes chiefly from France. A governing class, which, during a long period in which the Throne was all-powerful, had ceased to govern, was reduced to the ordinary level of citizenship. Modern France has had no governing class: her political life in the Third Republic, whatever else we may say of it, was unsettled. And here we may remark that when a dominant class, however badly it has performed its function, is forcibly removed, its function is not wholly taken over by any other. The ‘flight of the wild geese’ is perhaps a symbol of the harm that England has done to Ireland — more serious, from this point of view, than the massacres of Cromwell, or any of the grievances which the Irish most gladly recall. It may be, too, that England has done more harm to Wales and Scotland by gently attracting their upper classes to certain public schools, than by the wrongs (some real, some imaginary, some misunderstood) voiced by their respective nationalists. But here again, I wish to reserve judgment about Russia. That country, at the time of its revolution, may still have been at so early a stage of its development, that the removal of its upper class may prove not only not to have arrested that development but to have stimulated it. There are, however, some grounds for believing that the elimination of an upper class at a more developed stage can be a disaster for a country: and most certainly when that removal is due to the intervention of another nation.

I have, in the preceding paragraphs, been speaking mainly of the ‘governing class’ and the ‘governing elite’. But I must remind the reader again that in concerning ourselves with class versus elite, we are concerned with the total culture of a country, and that involves a good deal more than government. We can yield ourselves with some confidence to a governing elite, as the republican Romans surrendered power to dictators, so long as we have in view a defined purpose in a crisis — and a crisis may last a long time. This limited purpose also makes it possible to choose the elite, for we know what we are choosing it for. But, if we are looking for a way to select the right people to constitute every e1ite, for an indefinite future, by what mechanism are we to do this? If our ‘purpose’ is only to get the best people, in every walk of life, to the top, we lack a criterion of who are the best people or, if we impose a criterion, it will have an oppressive effect upon novelty. The new work of genius, whether in art, science or philosophy, frequently meets with opposition.

All that concerns me at the moment is the question whether, by education alone, we can ensure the transmission of culture in a society in which some educationists appear indifferent to class distinctions, and from which some other educationists appear to want to remove class distinctions altogether. There is, in any case, a danger of interpreting ‘education’ to cover both too much and too little: too little, when it implies that education is limited to what can be taught too much, when it implies that everything worth preserving can be transmitted by teaching. In the society desired by some reformers, what the family can transmit will be limited to the minimum, especially if the child is to be, as Mr. H. C. Dent hopes, manipulated by a unified educational system ‘from the cradle to the grave’. And unless the child is classified, by the officials who will have the task of sorting him out, as being just like his father, he will be brought up in a different — not necessarily a better, because all will be equally good, but a different — school environment, and trained on what the official opinion of the moment considers to be ‘the genuinely democratic lines’. The elites, in consequence, will consist solely of individuals whose only common bond will be their professional interest: with no social cohesion, with no social continuity. They will be united only by a part, and that the most conscious part, of their personalities they will meet like committees. The greater part of their ‘culture’ will be only what they share with all the other individuals composing their nation.

The case for a society with a class structure, the affirmation that it is, in some sense, the ‘natural’ society, is prejudiced if we allow ourselves to be hypnotised by the two contrasted terms aristocracy and democracy. The whole problem is falsified if we use these terms antithetically. What I have advanced is not a ‘defence of aristocracy’ — an emphasis upon the importance of one organ of society. Rather it is a plea on behalf of a form of society in which an aristocracy should have a peculiar and essential function, as peculiar and essential as the function of any other part of society. What is important is a structure of society in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, a continuous gradation of cultural levels: it is important to remember that we should not consider the upper levels as possessing more culture than the lower, but as representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture. I incline to believe that no true democracy can maintain itself unless it contains these different levels of culture. The levels of culture may also be seen as levels of power, to the extent that a smaller group at a higher level will have equal power with a larger group at a lower level for it may be argued that complete quality means universal irresponsibility and in such a society as I envisage, each individual would inherit greater or less responsibility towards the commonwealth, according to the position in society which he inherited – each class would have somewhat different responsibilities. A democracy in which everybody had an equal responsibility in everything would be oppressive for the conscientious and licentious for the rest.

There are other grounds upon which a graded society can be defended and I hope, in general, that this essay will suggest lines of thought that I shall not myself explore; but I must constantly remind the reader of the limits of my subject. If we agree that the primary vehicle for the transmission of culture is the family, and if we agree that in a more highly civilised society there must be different levels of culture, then it follows that to ensure the transmission of the culture of these different levels there must be groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life. And once again I must repeat, that the ‘conditions of culture’ which I set forth do not necessarily produce the higher civilisation: I assert only that when they are absent, the higher civilisation is unlikely to be found. ’