Ideas
NS Essay - 'Power elites dislike being identified: it threatens their covert authority'
Published 01 May 2006
Britain's secretive rulers consist of an incompetent executive class, a meaningless political class and a degraded professional class. Hywel Williams proposes a historical explanation
Words, which are supposed merely to express our thoughts, often try to shape them, too, as they lay down the tramlines along which the mind is meant to run. The truths of power and its hegemonies intrude into the order of syn- tax and vocabulary. Phrases which started life as analogies, metaphors and similes muscle their way into the mind and end up parading themselves as neutral descriptions of the way the world works. A generation ago these insights into structure and meaning kick-started many a career in literary criticism as "structuralism" made its way from the Left Bank into the senior common room. Subsequent entrenchment as holy writ inscribed in ponderous tomes has buried much of the movement's original diablerie and mischief. But political and economic thought have retained a pre-structuralist innocence - here the power of words to shape thinking at the level of strategy, their vulnerability to takeover by those who wish to enforce order on the world and wrest personal advantage from it, remain strangely uncommented on. At a personal level, the political commentator and the historian can be breezily and appropriately cynical about the ambitions, evasions and contradictions of the characters who seek and manipulate power. However, no one examines the lexicon of power that weaves a web of words and thereby seeks to trap us mentally.
The debate on "markets", therefore, gets very hot: do they or don't they work when applied to public services? Ideas of the public good and of private interest get bandied around. Yet the advocates and opponents alike forget that the power of the market starts as a mental picture - an analogy that is meant to appeal and elucidate. There is an almost uniform acceptance in Britain that this particular picture is a mirror of the way the world is - that markets work and that competition is the basis of capitalism. As a result, we forget that a market is just an invented metaphor rather than a neutral description of what is supposed to happen "naturally" as hands both hidden and more evident get to work.
Even the original market place of the trader is a contrivance, given that all those stalls do not just arrive from nowhere and there are always comparative advantages and disadvantages to their positioning. A market is always regulated, even when it pretends to be free: the only question is who does the fixing - who's in and who's out. In settling that question, it is the power of the elites which comes to the fore.
Even as a word, elite is hardly an innocent little thing. It advances towards us as another French import that seems quite smart, in this particular case dragging behind it a derivation from élit - the past participle (in Old French) of élire. Literally, the elites are those who either are, or have been, chosen or "elected". That passive condition or past state also communicates the idea of a done deal that all elites are keen to impress on us, something that has been sorted and has the air of finality about it. This, it is suggested, is an arrangement which has been made on our behalf and the contract is no longer open to revision; the same applies to the choices made. In a further effort to win our acceptance the elites through the centuries have attempted, quite successfully, another verbal hijack and a more extended meaning of the word which describes them and their activities.
Elites thus mean not just "the chosen ones" but also "the best". This idea confuses matters, as it is meant to do. An unnecessary complication is often a fraudster's best friend because it may throw suspicious folk off the scent. After all, an elite commod- ity - be it a wine, a car or a hotel suite - is just the best of its particular kind, and who could quarrel with the idea of the right of the best to exist? Considerations of refinement, good taste and right judgement now come into play - and an elite mind is surely the appropriate mechanism if you want to discard the dross and create the best. Dismissal of the elite, in these circumstances, would appear crass, ungracious and a sign of stupidity.
British confusions about the power elites who exist over us and among us have been created by the way in which this second layer of meaning has been allowed to overlie and obscure the first. But the closer we get to the original meaning, the more vulnerable any elite will appear. After all, someone had to do the choosing, and something must have happened to get the chosen ones into position. And once we see that the elites are where they find themselves because of an act of will, things become clearer, as well as disturbing.
All power elites represent a power grab. Their plausibility and continued existence actually require strenuous efforts, both to infiltrate the circle of power in the first place and then to hang on in there for dear life. Seeing them struggling for, asserting and conniving at power leads one to the conclusion that what has been done and chosen might then well be undone by somebody else's act of choice. And that somebody else might well be us.
Right across the western developed world in the early 21st century, the vocabulary of elites has replaced the language, and the category, of class. Old solidarities have been subsumed within new ones. Marxism and capitalism had supplied their adherents and adversaries alike with a grand narrative, a pur-posive scheme that explained the past and gave a guide to the present. As is often the case with such overarching narratives, the aim was to console as well as explain. Once provided with a structure to which they assented, adherents of both systems could relax safe in the knowledge that socio-economic function ruled the world.
That associative impulse existed in a rich and highly patterned variety: it was the principal feature of the world we have left behind. Social classes, trades unions, syndicalist organisations, fabricators of literary myths, organisers of petitions, agitators, reformers, anarchists and politicians produced their own elite organisations and elite members. The leaders proclaimed the virtue of a common solidarity and the need for mass action in order to achieve the goals common to the self-interest of all group members. The practicalities of power created individuals who were propelled by their own energy and ambition, by luck and circumstances, beyond the immediate lives of the masses in whose name they acted, wrote and agitated.
The 20th century's most famous example of this dynamic was Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who developed a particular theory of the leadership's advanced consciousness in the professed service of a mass solidarity. But this coincided with and was itself part of an even wider development: the arrival of the full-time professional and salaried politicians who ran industrialised societies. It was that which led to the emergence of political elites in their managerial form. Disengagement, mass depoliticisation, consumerist affluence, the disappearance of the working class into a new category - that of the low-paid - the collapse of the Berlin Wall into rubble: all have played their part in the disintegration of the structure that once gave meaning and lent justification to the activities of the power elites whether left, right or centrist, whether in public services or private business, whether chattering as opinion-formers, preaching as bishops, producing strategies as generals or writing minutes as permanent secretaries. And as the edifice that once sustained their careers has disappeared, so the nakedness of their new condition has become more obvious: perched on lonely eminences, unable to convince the rest of us (or, indeed, each other) that they really represent anyone apart from themselves, and increasingly talking just to each other. The very public nature of their seclusion is - at least for them - a real problem, because a power elite, in order to be genuinely powerful, cannot afford to advertise its elitist nature.
Before Lenin and his conspiracy, it was Calvin and his theology of the "elect" that had given the European history of the elite group its most startlingly effective twist. He did so in a way that has shaped all subsequent elite activity, for the key to the Calvinist elite was the intense psychological comfort of knowing that history and the march of progress were on the Calvinist side. Order and method were the clues to the ability to keep in step with that march, as well as the power of the group solidarity and group thinking that kept the elect together.
The conformity of dress, the use of certain key words and jargon, the recognition of a similar gleam in the eye: all these features of elite activity appear for the first time in their distinctively modern form in the group which governed Geneva. The elite anxiety appeared there for the first time, too: not until the end of their lives would they know, according to Calvin, whether they really had been the chosen ones of God. Our power elites are a more secular lot than the Council of Geneva. However, they suffer from a similar anxiety of justification which, in their case, presses on their heels in the here and now, rather than the hereafter.
Power elites - unlike the elites of fashion and high society - dislike being identified as such. Promotion and self- promotion through open access to privilege and power are considered more virtuous and more defensible in the "public interest" than the idea of an elite, which carries with it such strong connotations of an anti-democratic agenda. Meritocratic noise about "choice" and "opportunity" elevates the idea of those who rule because they are cleverer. Plato's anti-democratic ghost hovers around the elite at this point. And the meritocratic elite both elevates a certain idea of rationality and equates it with reason itself. Opposition to its rule and its particular idea of order then becomes tantamount to a declaration of war against reason itself, after which the insurrectionary threat of mob rule surely lurks just around the corner. The idea that modern democratic societies are inherently unstable forms part of the hegemony of the power elites, and especially so in Britain - a society which combines fairly strident rhetoric about parliamentary virtues with a truly iron law of oligarchic presence.
Britain's power elites have used different codes of language: liberal dignity, conservative virtue and socialist equality have all had a role to play. Yet all the codes have driven the political and administrative elites towards similar techniques of bureaucratic government - a coercion which is now overlaid by a noxious managerialism. As modern administrative systems become ever more diffuse and complicated, so it becomes more important that the power elites should have confidence in each other. They need not like or trust each other, but they do need to know and feel that they are the same kind of people if they are to keep the controlling show on the road and achieve their particular career goals. Only with that kind of goal-determined confidence can they plan and plot, conduct press conferences, read briefings and frame legislation. This is the world in which the "policy" that seems like a "thought" is really just a synonym for "strategy". For a long time in British history it worked - at least as far as elite career-building was concerned.
In Britain, identification as a member of an elite grouping always implies a significant threat to the continuation of one's covert authority. Which is why there are now so many millionaires who are cross with the Prime Minister after the unseemly exposure of their panting after a peerage. The strategies of elite concealment owe much to the power of various deep collective myths that the British, and especially the English, have embraced as a satisfactory way of explaining themselves. Hostile to rationalism and prone to a rough-and-ready empiricism as the best guide to life, this hardy island race is supposedly averse to theory. Such exercises in self-gratification show the continuing power of the Whig mind in British life - and its myth of a purposeful, progressive evolution that has guided Bri- tain to its present happy state and away from mayhem. Right across the elites, there is an invocation of the genial common sense of the British. The traditional right can use the myth to explain why Britain will always be an un-European country and elements on the left can use it to hymn the country's occasional strength of common purpose.
All that geniality, next to an occasional charm of manner, has been part of the story of Britain's power elites. Dickens became the novelist most loved by the British because he tickled the national instinct for the fancifully bizarre. He also confirmed in them the idea that games of social power are both important as a source of comedy and also somehow irrelevant, given the essentially humane geniality of the national style. In the satirical glories of English letters from Jonathan Swift onwards, there is both an observation of the follies of power and a confession of an inability to do anything about power except laugh at it. Passivity here is all. But the novelist who treated our power elites seriously would have a mighty theme: an executive class both haughty and incompetent, a political elite denuded of meaning, and a professional class whose self-regulation and self-esteem have been subverted by managerialist government and modern capitalism. And looming over it all as the elite of elites - the financial services of the City of London, a Leviathan whose interests have ensured the absorption of all other elites within the very belly of capital itself.
Hywel Williams is a historian and journalist. His latest book, Britain's Power Elites: the rebirth of a ruling class, is published by Constable (£12.99)
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