The Oppressed Ruling Class

A correspondent on my favourite professional email list laments that the intelligentsia rarely or never hold power.

Indeed, the modern left, while mostly professionals with advanced degrees, have convinced themselves that they somehow represent the disenfranchised poor and working class. How’d that happen?

In the broad sweep of history, the intelligentsia have almost always at least had an important role in government. They may not always have been the nominal rulers—that has sometimes been the military class, or aristocracy—but they have largely been the de facto governors, those who have their hands on the levers of power day to day.

In hunter-gatherer societies, the intelligentsia, the learned class, would be the medicine men, the witch doctors, the shamans. They held a power at least rivaling, perhaps exceeding that of the chiefs.

In China or Korea, the mandarinate were more powerful than the aristocracy, than anyone save the emperor himself, and could even depose him if they felt it necessary.

In India, the Brahmins were the top caste, those who had studied the Vedas, “as they had the most to do with intellect.” Above the Ksatriyas, the aristocracy, let alone the Vaisya bourgeoisie and Shudra proletariat.

In ancient Palestine, as the New Testament reports, the scribes and Pharisees held the real power, subject to appeal to Rome (and to the equivalent Roman class): these were, in modern terms, teachers, clergy, accountants, and lawyers. The educated elite.

So too in Medieval and early modern Europe: the educated or intellectual class was the clergy, and they made most of the daily decisions of law and government, holding all bureaucratic positions up to and including the chancellorship. They ran all schools and universities. They ran the hospitals. They kept the government records.

We all know about the Third Estate, and the Fourth Estate. But who was the First Estate? The educated class, the clergy: above the aristocracy, let alone the bourgeoisie. In England, they were considered part of the aristocracy: the House of Lords is formally divided into “Lords Spiritual” and “Lords Temporal” the former holding civil power due to their ecclesiastical office. In Germany and of course in Italy, bishops were often also the civil rulers of their diocese.

Many of the major intellectuals of history have indeed also held official state power: Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas More, Yi Yulgok, Machiavelli, Disraeli, Andre Malraux, Havel, Pol Pot, Lenin, Mao. I suppose Mussolini also counts as a serious political thinker.

Traditional Marxist doctrine holds that, with the French revolution and its kin, power passed from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Oddly skipping the intellectual class—Marx’s own class.

But a strong argument could be made that, instead, with the modern era, the highest power passed more completely from the Second to the First Estate. The bourgeoisie still wait for their day in the sun; let alone the proletariat or peasantry.

For who is really in charge of our law and government today? The lawyers. Some may be elected by the people as a whole—saving the courts, which wield independent power—but almost everyone elected is a lawyer. A holder of an advanced degree, a member of the intelligentsia.

Who is really in charge of our commerce? Not capitalists—not many of those, mostly just folks with pensions. It is the pension managers, and the MBAs who become corporate executives, all the way up to CEO. Again, holders of advanced degrees: the learned class; the intelligentsia. The bourgeoisie remain about what they always were, small shopkeepers making a middling living in their small shops.

Elsewhere in society, independent spheres of power are carved out by teachers and academics, medical doctors, social workers, journalists, scientists, and so forth. All have special privileges and powers. But all are members of the same professional or learned class.

So it is not that the intelligentsia is never in power; they continue in power now as they have always been, while other classes wax and wane around them. The old check from an aristocracy has been replaced, in some countries, by a similar check from democracy. In others, there is no longer any check—China, say; Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Vietnam, Laos.

Not that the best and the brightest of the intelligentsia are the ones with the most power. The brightest seem less attracted to power. As someone once said, “I have thought too much to stoop to action.” Research is more interesting.

Marxism, and especially Marxism-Leninism, is mostly a justification for the seizure of absolute power by the educated class (aka “the vanguard of the proletariat’).

This explains why it remains so popular in the universities, even when it has been thoroughly discredited in practice.

So, indeed, was Fascism.

The Pharisees we shall have always with us. Good people, too, most of them. But bad news when they lunge for total power.