working class," Lewis Lipsitz wrote, "... appears to be largely a product of lower education. With education controlled, middle-class individuals ... are not consistently less authoritarian than working-class individuals." The general impression of working-class backwardness remained, however, whether it was attributed to authoritarian family patterns or simply to insufficient education. The worker's "meager education," in the words of Albert Cohen and Harold Hodges, cut him off from "encounters with other, contrasting worlds." An effective challenge to the ruling assumptions about "modernization" and cultural backwardness would have had to question the equation of democracy with social mobility, secularization, educational opportunity, and the abandonment of traditional folkways. It would have had to question the image of working‐ class insularity popularized even by those who tried, like Mirra Komarovsky, to describe working-class culture with some sympathy but almost invariably spoke of a "narrowly circumscribed" existence unrelieved by contact with the great society beyond the neighborhood horizon. Beyond the neighborhood, Komarovsky said, "extends a vast darkness."

Blind to their own prejudices, the children of light could not see that their own world was in many ways just as narrowly circumscribed as the worker's. If the worker spent his days in the company of "people very like himself," so did the educated classes. Their travels took them around the globe, but the internationalization of the professional and managerial mode of life meant that they encountered the same kind of people and the same living conditions everywhere they went: the same hotels, the same three-star restaurants, the same conference rooms and lecture halls. Education gave them vicarious access to the world's culture, but their acquaintance with that culture was increasingly selective and fragmentary, and it did not seem to have strengthened the capacity for imaginative identification with experience alien to their own. Their educated jargon had lost touch with everyday spoken language and no longer served as a repository of the community's common sense. Academic discourse had achieved a certain analytical precision, in law and medicine and the hard sciences, at the expense of vividness and evocative power; while in fields like psychiatry, sociology, and social work, it merely distinguished insiders from outsiders and gave an air of scientific prestige to practices embarrassed by their homely origins. Academic English—the abstract,

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