Intellectual Elitism

"The world is crowded with intellectuals whose main role is to provide authority in their labor while gaining great profit." — Edward Said, quoted by Finkenstaedt

Summary

Written in 1999 and at 422 pages the longest work in the oeuvre, Intellectual Elitism is Finkenstaedt's most direct engagement with the sociology of American literary life. Its argument, sustained across four parts and twenty-one chapters, is stated with characteristic precision: the postwar American intellectual class, for all its rhetoric of alienation and dissent, became one of the most effective instruments of cultural consolidation in consumer society — protecting its privileges while performing its opposition.

Part I examines the historical formation of the literary intelligentsia and its rise, after the Second World War, to the status of a "strategic elite" — a culturally prestigious group whose moral authority gave the dominant order its intellectual legitimacy. Drawing on Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and a range of sociologists, Finkenstaedt shows how the intellectual's traditional posture of critical independence became, in the postwar decades, a professional identity and a social distinction — a form of cultural capital that separated the writer from the consumer middle class while leaving the structures of power entirely intact.

Part II examines alienation in its many varieties: among Jewish writers navigating between ethnic particularity and assimilation; among Southern writers drawing on a tradition of defeat and nostalgia; among homosexual writers whose outsider status was both genuine and aestheticized; among poets, postmodernists, and mainstream realists. In each case the analysis is the same: alienation as literary pose, as aesthetic distinction — not as genuine challenge to the social order.

Part III turns to the more serious attempts at contestation — the Beats, women writers, postmodernist rebels — and finds them too ultimately absorbed. The Beats' outrage became marketable; women's rebellion was dismissed or domesticated; postmodernist self-referentiality, however dazzling, consolidated the modernist aesthetic at precisely the moment when it served conservative ends.

Part IV, on pragmatic adaptation, is the most unsparing section. A meticulous examination — writer by writer — of the ways in which Heidegger, Eliot, Pound, Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Barth, DeLillo, and many others accommodated themselves to the rewards of success: through cultural distinction, the aestheticization of power, the exploitation of sexual and racial dynamics, and the narcissism that consumer culture both produces and rewards. The conclusion reserves its most searching analysis for the contrast between white intellectual complicity and Black American writing, in which the historical necessity of confronting real exclusion produced the only genuinely adversarial literature the postwar period generated.

Key Quotes

"For the viability of consumer society depends not only on administrative organization but on the participation of a relatively politically passive but culturally respected literary establishment."

"Alienation was traditional, and so it could be used to justify the special and separatist status of the mandarat."

"The aesthetic act itself is ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions."

"Western thought tends to be all-consuming and all-revising. 'Other cultures…never laid claim to universality. Nor did they…claim to be different — until difference was forcibly injected into them…They live on the basis of their own singularity.'"

Key Themes

The strategic elite — The postwar intellectual class is analyzed not as a free-floating critical intelligence but as a social institution, shaped by the same forces of hierarchy, self-interest, and exclusion that structure every other institution of capitalist culture.

Alienation as capital — The posture of dissent and alienation is shown to function, in the postwar literary world, as a form of prestige — a mark of distinction that elevated the writer above the consumer middle class while consolidating his position within it.

The sociology of absorption — Every apparent challenge to the dominant culture — the Beats, women's writing, postmodernism, the Black Arts Movement — is examined for the mechanisms by which it was absorbed, commodified, or neutralized.

The Heidegger case — A sustained analysis of Heidegger's Nazism as the paradigmatic case of what happens when the Western intellectual's ontological commitment to cultural totalism meets political power directly.

Black writing as counter-example — The one genuinely adversarial literary tradition in postwar America is shown to be that of Black writers — not because they chose adversarialism, but because their historical position within the system made conformity impossible.

In the Context of the Oeuvre

Intellectual Elitism is the sociological companion to Capitalist Writing and Its Underside — where that book examines the literary texts themselves, this one examines the social and institutional conditions under which they were produced. Together they form the most comprehensive critique of postwar American literary culture in Finkenstaedt's oeuvre. The book also serves as the bridge between the literary history of Between-War Writing and the sweeping global synthesis of The Global Mind, which follows it chronologically.