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processes. Rather, they apply their skills on behalf of those who com–
mand property. And while property holders by no means constitute a
monolithic group, they are not guided by exclusively technical interests.
Despite the importance of technical skill today, societies of our type
are not ruled by a technocratic elite. In fact, a technocratic elite would
have immense difficulty in developing purely technical criteria for poli–
tical decisions.
Nevertheless, the upper reaches of the technical intelligentsia (high–
er civil servants, private managers, directors of the communications
and knowledge industries) do manifest a technocratic consciousness,
based in part on a proper sense of their role in industrial society, but
in part also on an ideology designed to advance their interests as a
group. This consciousness may be elaborated as a doctrine of the limits
of political decision (ministers propose but bureaucrats dispose) or it
may refer to the supposed independence of the technocrats from market
considerations (in which case it merges with the ideology of "public
service" utilized by the great corporations to legitimize their economic
and political power) .
The technical intelligentsia, which comprises a variety of occupa–
tions, is vertically divided, and its members are at different distances
from those who command this new hierarchy of skills, who are them–
selves at one remove from those who actually dominate the political and
economic bureaucracies. The rapid increase of positions for the technical
intelligentsia does not necessarily mean they have a rapprochement with
their employers, even if a technical career might represent a move up.
In the circumstances, the technical intelligentsia, (which in the
United States has grown from 8 to 13 percent of the labor force since
1950) must employ its acquired skills by selling its labor power to
bureaucratic employers. The supposed "professionalization" of certain
newer intellectual occupations has been accompanied by a bureaucratiza–
tion of professional activity generally. In this sense, "professionalization"
means a certain control of entry into privileged employment, not the
emergence of new sets of bourgeois virtuosi into a substantively as well
as fonnally free labor market. Technical and intellectual labor responds
not only to the advance of the sciences, but to the need for a trained
and specialized (as distinct from an educated and cultivated) labor
force.
II. The Universities
Partly in response to demands of advanced societies, the universities
everywhere have grown enormously. While immediate problems (over–
crowding, the diminished effectiveness of a teaching corps which has
