small property holders were the hope of democracy. Insofar as he cared about democracy at all, he believed that its future lay with the "new class." After experimenting with a tepid philosophy of altruism and efficiency, he had come to the conclusion that the new class needed a more appealing ideology for mass consumption. In effect, he decided that the new class might have to speak in the idiom of nineteenth-century producerism.

His political instinct told him, quite correctly, that this was the only idiom capable of sustaining general "enthusiasm for action," at least in the United States, but neither he nor any of his fellow New Dealers could speak it with any conviction. In spite of his early years in Wyoming, the spectacle of Thurman Arnold as a champion of the small producer was inherently unconvincing. His accent—the characteristic accent of the New Deal, of genial contempt, sophisticated raillery, and hard-boiled humanitarianism—gave him away as a charter member of the civilized minority.

Poor Arnold! If the public could not take him seriously as a populist and trustbuster, the new class could not take him seriously as a social scientist. His books were far too lively, his manner too breezy and irreverent, his footnotes too few and far between. Satire, it turned out, was not to be the approved form of managerial speech. It implied the existence of a public, however attenuated, whereas the new class, in its effort to make government scientific, preferred to talk only to itself. The only community it recognized was the community of scientific inquiry, in which satire had no place. Arnold himself recognized this and apologized for writing in a humorous vein. Only in scientifically underdeveloped fields like economics and law, he said, was it necessary to resort to ridicule. Satire was a sure sign of cultural lag.

By the I940s, most social scientists were ready to put this primitive

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