BOOKS
633
OLD AND NEW CLASSES
THE FUTURE OF INTELLECTUALS AND THE RISE OF THE NEW
CLASS.
By
Alvin W. Gouldner.
Seabury Press. $8.95.
Nearly as old as the notion of the class struggle, the role of a
New Class of intellectuals has been discussed by every self-respecting
political thinker since Marx. Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, saw
intelleclUals as undermining the capitalist system, as adversaries, as
staffers of political offices, speech writers, and newspeople; F.A. Hayek
maintained that the move towards socialism was governed by intellec–
tual leadership in corporate managers; and Milovan Djilas talked of
party leaders and bureaucrats after a revolution as the New Ruling
Class. Most New Class hypotheses about the West denied an impend–
ing class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and those about
the East proved that even the revolution cannot abolish classes. But
currently, in America, some have used the term "New Class" as a
catchall designation for neoconservatives, for former liberal and social–
ist thinkers such as Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz-most of whom not
only theorize about the existence or nonexistence of this New Class but
are also close to power.
In this company, Alvin Gouldner's
The Future of Intellectuals
and the Rise of the New Class
represents a departure: he takes on all
these theorists and also steps outside the fray to argue that the New
Class is composed of two major segments -intellectuals and a techni–
cal intelligentsia-and that the radical components of their ideas,
though badly flawed, eventually will revolutionize our society. Gould–
ner supports this position with sixteen closely reasoned theses, begin–
ning with the defects in the Marxist scenario which forgot
to
account
for the vanguard position of the peasants in Russia and China, for the
revolutionary theorists in a revolution, and for the transition from the
old state apparatus
to
a new and nonrepressive one. But Gouldner's
"end of ideology" bypasses the ritual indictment of communism and
the glorification of the status quo (however qualified), if on ly because
he perceives technocratic consciousness and scientism as ideologies
shared by both Marxists and their opponents . And he does not consider
the New Left and the counterculturists of the late 1960s as a dangerous
political force. Some of them, however, he argues, may belong to the
Vanguard of the New Class, having become politically radicalized-
