The tacit message is that it will be especially marginal intellectuals and intelligentsia who will have an interest in criticizing the calcified certainties of their intellectual communities and societies. They are a New Class to the extent that the potential for rationality remains embedded even in the new structures of economic and political domination they may generate. Thus, intellectuals and intelligentsia are a New Class to the extent that they subordinate their commitments to rationality to the pursuit of incomes. This idea of marginality as the suspension of material and political interests in favor of the interest in truth, is central to Gouldner's theory of the New Class as the ever-present critical potential of the CCD. Marginality thus presupposes an idea of intellectual “virtue” beyond concrete paradigms, theoretical schools, parties, agencies, states, and universities, viewing these as both partial expressions of that “virtue” and, significantly, as sociological limits to its fuller expression. Marginal social theorists produce and respond to sociologies of intellectuals precisely because their very alienation also makes them the preeminent students of theoretical communities. It is the temperamentally or structurally alienated who have little stake in the taken-for-granted theories, methods, and facts of the community or “the school,” who fish about for alternative constructions of reality. It is “the stranger,” to use George Simmel's term, in intellectual communities who is interested in facing the truth about the utilities which that community's common sense generates for it.
#HAND OF FATE MINOTAUR PROFESSIONAL#
I do not mean this in the sense of inferiority or rusticity, but as active alienation, which promotes a temperamental refusal to submit to the dictates of a “school” or a professional role. Tentatively, I would suggest that the metaphysical pathos and structural grounds of a generalized New Class theory is the condition of marginality. It necessarily implicates the speaker of truths (and of half-truths) as interested in the fate of the world he is committed to describe, to organize, to transform, to revolutionize, and in which he must at least make a living.Ĭlearly, then, any such theory that claims to speak the truth is faced with the problem of “a place to stand.” On what basis can it claim to be true? Given its own claims about theory, what is its own political and social infrastructure? What are the specific social interests animating the Socratic project? What, in short, is the sociology of reflexivity itself? So, while a New Class theory makes statements about the world, it also makes statements about intellectual speech about the world. It also entails reflection about intellectual speakers and the social organization of their communities. A general theory of the New Class cannot be understood only as an objective description of the world.
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