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Book Review: Fussell on Class

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136 points DaoIsTheWay | 1 comments | 05 Mar 21 02:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.346s | source
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hprotagonist ◴[05 Mar 21 03:31 UTC] No.26352260[source]▶
X people constitute something like a classless class. They occupy the one social place in the USA where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful. Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theaters of class which enclose others...in some ways they resemble E.M. Forster's "aristocracy of the plucky", whose members are "sensitive for others as well as themselves...considerate without being fussy."

A fairly traditional name for this class is “Intelligensia”.

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1. hc-taway ◴[05 Mar 21 03:42 UTC] No.26352337[source]▶
Most of the people who'd comprise a traditional "intelligentsia", Fussell'd probably put in (by class, but interestingly, not so much by income) the upper-middle (artists, professors, literary figures, editors of "classy" magazines).

Graeber builds on this in Bullshit Jobs by taking a stab at why this is, which is in part because most of these jobs pay like crap and take a ton of time to get into, but are nonetheless desirable, so they're preferentially held by people who have enough family support to earn little or nothing for years and years and still not have to worry much (plus family contacts are a big deal in some of them). Graeber's analysis of the class-dynamics of desirable, seen-as-basically-contributing-to-humanity jobs is one of the more interesting parts of that book, IMO (the military is the equivalent for people who can't afford a PhD plus five years of unpaid internships in a high COL city, travel, etc.)