Birmingham, Stephen. The Right People: A Portrait of the American Social
Establishment. New York: Dell, 1969. 325 pages.
This book is a relic from the 1960s, when sociology undergraduates
could read academic essays about class structure within American society
without so much as a single reference to Karl Marx. Popular books such as
this one picked up on the same theme, usually by tracing the lifestyles of
those with old money. This was probably a holdover from the Depression
years, when soup lines coexisted with massive mansions. But then in the
1970s some student-movement veterans were seriously interested in tracking
the ruling class and studying Marxism. That prompted a backlash, and by the
mid-1980s you couldn't even mention "Karl Marx" on campus if you hoped for
a career.
The moral of this story is that American writers and academics are
allowed to indulge a superficial interest in social class, but only if they
don't get serious about power-structure research. Birmingham has written
numerous popular and interesting books about American elites. This shows
that a safety valve here or there, playing the role of court jester, is
something that is tolerably amusing for the upper classes, precisely because
it is non-threatening. Occasionally we index these books in NameBase, but
we have yet to get very excited over them.
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