It was never altogether clear, for that matter, just what social grouping the notion of a new class was supposed to refer to. Sometimes it was played off not against business but against the technical intelligentsia, itself a candidate for new-class status in the first of the three traditions on which neoconservatives drew more or less at random. In The End of Ideology (1960), Daniel Bell contrasted the "intellectual" with the "scholar," evidently to the advantage of the latter. The scholar had to assume responsibility for a "bounded field of knowledge," but the free-floating intellectual acknowledged no responsibility except to himself. The scholar was "less involved with his 'self,' " whereas the intellectual seldom transcended "his experience, bis individual perceptions." In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell argued that the nihilistic hedonism celebrated by adversarial intellectuals undermined the work discipline required by capitalism (though he also argued, well beyond the limits of the neoconservative consensus, that capitalism itself encouraged hedonism and was thus at war with itself). In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), however, "new men" referred to the "technical and professional intelligentsia," whose skills had become essential to the maintenance of an "information society." ^* In general, neoconservatives took a kindlier view of the new class when they identified it with scientific and technical expertise than when they identified it with cultural radicalism. In Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Techuetronic Era, Zbigniew Brze-

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"While these technologists are not bound by a sufficient common interest to make them a political class, they do have common characteristics.... The norms of the new intelligentsia—the norms of professionalism—are a departure from the hitherto prevailing norms of economic self-interest which have guided a business civilization. In the upper reaches of this new elite—that is, in the scientific community—men hold significantly different values [from] those authorizing economic self-aggrandizement, which could become the foundation of the new ethos for such a class." Unfortunately the ethic of professionalism had to compete for the allegiance of the "knowledge class" with the "apocalyptic, hedonistic, and nihilistic" ethic promoted by literary modernism and popularized by the counterculture. In the closing pages of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell argued that "these anti-bourgeois values ... go hand in hand with the expansion of a new intellectual class huge enough to sustain itself economically as a class.... This new class, which dominates the media and the culture, thinks of itself less as radical than 'liberal,' yet its values, centered on 'personal freedom,' are anti-bourgeois."

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