The educated minotaur

Conclusion

A general theory of the New Class cannot be understood only as an objective description of the world. It also entails reflection about intellectual speakers and the social organization of their communities. So, while a New Class theory makes statements about the world, it also makes statements about intellectual speech about the world. It necessarily implicates the speaker of truths (and of half-truths) as interested in the fate of the world he is committed to describe, to organize, to transform, to revolutionize, and in which he must at least make a living.

Clearly, then, any such theory that claims to speak the truth is faced with the problem of “a place to stand.” On what basis can it claim to be true? Given its own claims about theory, what is its own political and social infrastructure? What are the specific social interests animating the Socratic project? What, in short, is the sociology of reflexivity itself?

Tentatively, I would suggest that the metaphysical pathos and structural grounds of a generalized New Class theory is the condition of marginality. I do not mean this in the sense of inferiority or rusticity, but as active alienation, which promotes a temperamental refusal to submit to the dictates of a “school” or a professional role. It is “the stranger,” to use George Simmel's term, in intellectual communities who is interested in facing the truth about the utilities which that community's common sense generates for it. It is the temperamentally or structurally alienated who have little stake in the taken-for-granted theories, methods, and facts of the community or “the school,” who fish about for alternative constructions of reality. Marginal social theorists produce and respond to sociologies of intellectuals precisely because their very alienation also makes them the preeminent students of theoretical communities. Marginality thus presupposes an idea of intellectual “virtue” beyond concrete paradigms, theoretical schools, parties, agencies, states, and universities, viewing these as both partial expressions of that “virtue” and, significantly, as sociological limits to its fuller expression.

This idea of marginality as the suspension of material and political interests in favor of the interest in truth, is central to Gouldner's theory of the New Class as the ever-present critical potential of the CCD. Thus, intellectuals and intelligentsia are a New Class to the extent that they subordinate their commitments to rationality to the pursuit of incomes. They are a New Class to the extent that the potential for rationality remains embedded even in the new structures of economic and political domination they may generate. The tacit message is that it will be especially marginal intellectuals and intelligentsia who will have an interest in criticizing the calcified certainties of their intellectual communities and societies. The tacit hope is that the New Class will continue to generate and tolerate marginality. The tragic expectation is that even such creative marginality may in the end only produce new irrationalities and new forms of oppression.

Behind the objective theory, therefore, lies an ambivalent assessment of the value of reason as such, an assessment no doubt rooted in Gouldner's own life, as well as in his understanding of modern and contemporary history. In particular, Gouldner appears forever caught on the horns of this dilemma: the fear of irrationalism, the passions, Romanticism, the Dionysian, on the one hand, and rationalism, repression, Classicism, the Appolonian on the other. For him, the life worth living (the examined, but also the experienced, life) and the class worth having must manage a precarious balance between these dispositions. The dominance of either one produces, respectively, destructive fanaticism and its counterpoint, Romantic dissolution, on the one hand, or grey, deadening, functionally harmonious, rational worlds, on the other. For this reason, Gouldner fears both the New Class's penchant for zealous voluntarism, as well as its tendencies to settle in, to submit all human impulses to scientific rules.

Gouldner would have liked, I imagine, to have been able to report a New Class in the making that would eventually make everybody happy; he had to make do with “history's best card,” hoping against hope that our capacity for reflexivity and remembrance might forestall the worst. In the end, he appears very much as he once described Max Weber: “a man caught between two electrodes and torn by the current passing between them; he fears both but is unable to let go of either.”