ism. Books like The New Class, by Milovan Djilas (1957), and The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi (1979), appealed to ex-Marxists, in the United States as in Europe, who had turned against Stalinism but retained the intellectual habits of Marxism and therefore took it for granted that a new form of society implied the existence of a new ruling class. Occasionally someone pointed out that the rise of the monolithic Soviet state called for a reconsideration of the whole concept of a ruling class, not for attempts to stretch it to fit a new situation. Those who had been raised on the Marxian theory of history, however—and this category included a number of intellectuals who later became neoconservatives—did not pay much attention to such objections. They needed a ruling class, if only to sustain their own self-image as a lonely band of truth tellers who dared to question the reigning orthodoxy, and they found it in the makers of the "managerial revolution."

The third source of new-class theory had the longest lineage of all, originating in Burke's attack on the French revolution. As early as 1856, Tocqueville provided a definitive statement of the case against the revolutionary intelligentsia, which informed all subsequent criticism of the revolutionary tradition. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville depicted the revolutionary intellectuals as irresponsible dreamers and fanatics, "quite out of touch with practical politics" and therefore lacking the "experience which might have tempered their enthusiasms." Their "fondness for broad generalizations" and for "cut-and-dried legislative systems," their "contempt for hard facts," their "taste for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines," and their "desire to reconstruct the entire constitution according to the rules of logic and a preconceived system" were the product of rootless alienation, in Tocqueville's view. Later commentators added to this indictment the accusation that intellectuals were consumed by envy of the rich and powerful and by a desire for revenge; we have seen how Georges Sorel developed this theme in his attack on the Dreyfusard, socialistic intelligentsia of the Third Republic. Julien Benda turned the same kind of argument against Sorel himself in his Trahison des clercs (1927), and Raymond Aron turned it against Marxism in The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). French history is full of complaints against visionary, power-mad intellectuals, no doubt because the legacy of the revolution has proved so divisive; but the same tradition informed the work of George Orwell and other English writers

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