- Suraj Beri
Sources: Clockwise from top left- Forbes, Telegraph, Pintrest, Holidify.com
Inequality is one of the fundamental features of contemporary societies. Sociologists focus on interrogating how inequalities are produced, sustained, and reproduced. Charles Tilly’s[i] concept of ‘durable inequalities’ refers to the system of social and cultural privileges and disadvantages that are transferred from one generation to the next. With the coming of modern democratic politics and the spread of related socio-cultural norms, ascribed inequalities often invite public ridicule and some disapproval. Inequality looks more tolerable if it’s purportedly achieved through ‘hard work’, ‘merit’ and extraordinary talent’. How did we arrive here?
With our gradual socialisation in democratic processes, we are now more tuned to ideas of ‘openness’, ‘access’. They are part of the popular currency. Social sciences in general and economics, in particular, have paid great attention and energy to map levels of poverty. Scores of economists have won Noble prizes for focusing on how the poor live, spend, and behave but rarely has anyone studied how elites become and remain elites in a democracy. Unfortunately, this neglect to study elites has happened precisely when their rise and lifestyles have been the talk of popular culture. The media attention on celebrity weddings would bear witness to this.[ii] So would the regular media mentions of the number of Indian billionaires that have found their place in the Forbes List.[iii]
In the past three decades, we have witnessed the rapid growth of income, wealth, and resources by corporate elites. The recent Global Wealth Report[iv] shows that in the Indian context, the top 10 percent of the population holds around 70 percent of the national wealth. The growing wealth concentration at the top and in the hands of elite caste groups continues to be the popular trend[v]. With the process of neoliberal capitalism, gaps have widened between rich and extreme poor. In this context, one should have expected detailed sociological studies done on the processes of wealth accumulation and reproduction of privilege. Yet we needed Thomas Piketty[vi] to remind us about these glaring inequalities and continuous amassing of wealth at the top.
Why did this happen? How do we understand the gradual decline of academic interest in elites? This absence marks even progressive political and ideological discourses. One of the factors which explain this invisibility of elites in social science discussion is perhaps linked to discourses on democracies. When societies such as India opened to hitherto marginalized groups in its social and political spheres, it signalled a process of ‘pluralization of power’. This appeared to render irrelevant any discussion on ‘elite presence in democracies.’ Sociologists have only recently started asking anew questions of inequality within democracies. Old questions about the compatibility of capitalism and democracies are being raised again. [vii]
Two, during the 1960s when C. W. Mills was researching American power elites, the concept of ‘elite’ was just about recovering from its association with ‘fascism’ during the times of Pareto and Mosca. Three, in the post-World War period the political tensions of the old War impinged upon the practice of the social sciences. The focus was on the ‘rise of the middle classes’ in the West European world. The intent was to delegitimise the ‘polarisation of class’ narrative associated with Marxism The ‘embourgeoisement thesis’ was in ascendency and therefore the academic focus shifted away from studying powerful elites to what was seen as the slow but steady movement of people to the ranks of the middle class in West Europe and North America. .This was tied to the narrative of ‘upward social mobility’ of the poor and an analysis of the political and economic implications of the ‘democratization processes’.
Four, the empirical critique of ‘class analysis’ in the wake of these social changes, challenged the legitimacy of categories such as ‘ruling class’ and power elite. The voluminous literature that showed that the working class is no more a revolutionary agent in England and later on in European contexts too helped dilute any critical discussion about who rules, who monopolizes, and what is the social and cultural character of elites. The fifth and final blow, in my view, came with the growing Foucauldian perspective and the idea of a decentred nature of power, an insistence of capillary power that buttressed the new modes of neoliberal governance.
All these social, political, and intellectual developments have contributed to the slipping away of elites from sociological scrutiny. In recent years sociologists have revitalized the elite studies and reengaged in examining the mechanisms of power and inequality in the contemporary world (Savage, 2015). The growing privatization process along with neoliberal policies have raised questions about the nature of elites and their distaste for democracies and the idea of welfare states. The symptom of the shrinking space for critique of the economic elites becomes obvious when any academician who tries to map elite privileges and their social practices is labelled as ‘leftist’ or ‘Maoist’.
In a different vein, the aggressive push for dismantling of all democratic institutions globally as much as in India is now being termed as ‘revolt of elites’[viii]. The contemporary social and political turmoil provides the opportunity to reject the discourse of ‘meritocracy’ of elites and critically examine in what ways they hide their mechanisms of exclusions and monopolization of resources, and undermine the basic tenets of democracy-liberty, equality, and fraternity. Through the discourse of ‘hard work’ and ‘talent’, elites tend to blame the poor for their poverty turn away from any questioning of their privileges.
The moral pinch for the sociological imagination comes from the connections and contradictions between our tacit understandings of how life should be and what our empirical studies tell us life is. Drawing on Bourdieu, we can say that the task of sociological imagination has always been to expose the mechanisms of domination, the discourse of power which sabotage human freedom and dignity. With the growing domination of a neoliberal security state, the real challenge is to understand, examine and experience how Sociology responds to growing anti-democratic authoritarian conditions and rejuvenate/resurrect the "critique" from its paralysis. It is only by doing a sociology of privilege and focusing on the engines of inequality i.e. elites, that we can better understand how inequalities are structured and organized. We need to understand the consequences of invisiblizing them.
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1. Appaduari, Arjun. (2020). ‘We are witnessing the revolt of the Elites’, The Wire, 22nd April 2020, accessible at https://thewire.in/politics/populism-elite-narendra-modi-donald-trump.
2. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3. Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
4. Savage, Mike et al. (2015). Social Class in 21st Century. Pelican Books.
5. Tilly, Charles. (1998). Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[i] Tilly, 1998. Durable Inequality.
[ii] https://theprint.in/opinion/deepika-padukone-and-priyanka-chopra-are-showing-how-to-ace-sindoor-and-feminism/160549/.
[iv] ‘Richest 10% of Indians own over 3/4th of wealth in India’, The Livemint, @3rd October 2018.
[v] ‘India's top 63 billionaires have more wealth than 2018-19 Budget outlay’, Business Standard, January 21st, 2020.
[vi] Piketty, 2014.
[vii]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/mobilized_contention/files/merkel_-_is_capitalism_compatible_with_democracy.pdf.
[viii] Appaduari, Arjun. 2020. ‘We are witnessing the revolt of the Elites’, The Wire, 22nd April 2020, accessible at https://thewire.in/politics/populism-elite-narendra-modi-donald-trump.
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Suraj Beri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.
A very well written piece which maps how we ought to go about social sciences in general and would not just limit it to sociology itself
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