As a bold new social myth, this left a good deal to be desired. It was simply a broader statement of the efficiency expert's point of view, which by Arnold's own admission could not command general enthusiasm. It was the creed of the "new class," as he called it in The Folklore of Capitalism. The "engineers, salesmen, minor executives, and social workers," because they ran the "country's temporal affairs" behind the scenes, represented the ruling class of the future. In the universities, the new class consisted of a "group of younger economists, political scientists, and lawyers." All these professions shared a "humanitarian" belief in the need for "efficiency in the distribution of goods" and a skeptical attitude toward the "worship of the American businessman." They had not yet developed a fully articulated political theory, but neither had the capitalists developed such a theory before they came to power in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith gave them one after the fact; and the new class would find its own theorist once it found itself securely entrenched in the halls of government.

After explaining at length that the masses needed romance, glamour, and the excitement, Arnold had nothing to give them but tolerance and maturity. It may well have been a sense of the inadequacy of his "new social philosophy" that caused Arnold to cast about for more compelling symbols of the managerial revolution. He found them in an unlikely place. In 1938, he began to discover unsuspected possibilities in the antitrust tradition, which he had previously ridiculed. Those who followed his career were puzzled by the seeming contradiction between his vigorous enforcement of the Sherman Act as assistant attorney general and the contemptuous treatment of antitrust laws in his earlier writings. As head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department from 1938 to 1943, he launched almost as many prosecutions as all his predecessors put together. In 1937, however, he had argued that antitrust laws perpetuated the illusion that a "highly organized and centralized industrial organization" was really "composed of individuals." When he entered the Justice Department, Arnold himself wondered "just how" he "was going to explain" his "present enthusiasm for the antitrust laws in the light of what" he "had written just a year before."

The explanation, if there was one, lay in his contention that in order to gain acceptance for a new idea, it was necessary to disguise it as an old one. "A new idea must appear to be an old idea before it will work at all," he wrote in The Bottlenecks of Business (1940), and the Sherman Act, as a

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