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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Male and white privilege are on the decline, yet elite privilege has gone from strength to strength. The privileges enjoyed by the rich and powerful are not only unfair but cause widespread harm, from the everyday slights and humiliations visited on those lower down the scale to the distortions in the labour market when elites use their networks to secure plum jobs, not least in new domains such as professional sports.
In this book, Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton show that elite privilege is not a mere by-product of wealth but an organising principle for society as a whole. They explore the practices and processes that sustain, legitimise and reproduce elite privilege and show how we are all implicated in the system, both facilitating it and tolerating its harmful effects.
Building on their original fieldwork and a wide range of other sources, the authors paint a vivid picture of the micropolitics of elite privilege, highlighting in particular the vital role played by exclusive private schools. Ranging across topics as diverse as ‘glamour suburbs’, philanthropy, Rhodes scholarships and super-yachts, The Privileged Few delves beneath attempts at concealment to expose how the elites keep getting away with it.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Summary
Notes
2. Understanding Elite Privilege
Who are the elites?
Recognising privilege
Helpful concepts
Forms of capital
The other elites
Doing privilege
Classes, elites and hierarchies
Summary
Notes
3. The Micropolitics of Elite Privilege
Signalling
The language of status
The rules of the game
A case study: public administration
Unconspicuous consumption
Boundary riders
Tastes and class
Summary
Notes
4. The Geography of Privilege
Privileging space
Consecrating elite suburbs
Elite suburbs as sites for accumulation
Moral geography
On not having to wait
Summary
Notes
5. Replicating Privilege: Elite Schools
‘Educational apartheid’
Exclusiveness and distinction
Making symbolic capital
Making social capital
Making cultural capital
Moral distinction
The academic veneer
Making global citizens
Legitimation strategies
Summary
Notes
6. Sites of Privilege
Elite colonisation of the arts and sport
Honours for privilege
Rhodes scholars
The judiciary
Summary
Notes
7. The Power of Giving
Philanthropic hyper-agents
Setting agendas
Philanthrocapitalism
Skewing movements
Co-opting charities
Power networks
Cultural capital
Reputation laundering
Summary
Notes
8. The Privilege Blender
Networking at the top
Are tech bros different?
Gender versus class
‘The misogyny pipeline’
Elite, white and male privilege
Summary
Notes
9. Hiding and Justifying Privilege
Naturalising
Meritocracy
Obliviousness
Concealing with shared symbols
Hiding wealth
Origin stories
Service work
Modest consumers
Summary
Notes
10. Psychic Harms
The landscape
Shame
Looking up, looking down
Privilege in the playground
Summary
Notes
11. Economic and Social Harms
Distorting markets
Ressentiment
Discourse power
Civic harms
Summary
Notes
12. Contesting Privilege
Notes
Appendices
Appendix 1 The National Survey
Interview schedule
Appendix 2 The Focus Groups
A note on interpretation
Notes
Appendix 3 Piketty, Bourdieu and Privilege
Income inequality
Wealth inequality
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Privileged Few
Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton 2024
The right of Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5970-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5971-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948769
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
The privileges enjoyed by some are an endlessly fascinating and at times infuriating topic of conversation. In private and online, people express feelings of injustice and exasperation. They dissect the ways power and privilege work. For them, reading this book may provoke all kinds of emotions. It might even work as a kind of therapy through the power of knowing. We hope, however, that it goes beyond therapy to initiate a serious and sustained debate that leads to social change.
In the game of privilege, we will argue, everyone is a player. So, if we are to write about privilege, we should declare our own. We have had many advantages in life. We are both white, well-educated and well-paid, and we hail from culturally, although not materially, rich families. One of us is male. We have therefore benefited from the many unfair advantages that white middle-class Australians enjoy. It should be mentioned that we were both educated at state schools.
Social scientists are nowadays asked to acknowledge their privilege because their privilege may get in the way of understanding the lives of those they write about. In our case, because we are studying people generally seen as well above us in the social hierarchy, our problem is not so much that we are privileged as that we are not privileged enough. If we had hailed from wealthy families and attended exclusive private schools, we would undoubtedly have deeper and more empathetic insights into the world of wealthy elites. The drawback, of course, is that we would be less likely to subject elite privilege to a critical gaze. We would see the world differently.
As we have not walked in the shoes of the privileged elites, even if we have occasionally borrowed their Havaianas, we utter the same gasps of dismay that pepper the dinner-table conversations of everyday citizens when they hear about a rich businessman or celebrity being granted an advantage denied to others. After the dinner-table conversations, we have been left wondering how this system of privilege works and why it elicits such strong reactions. It is our privilege as academic researchers to be in a position to take the time to find some answers.
CHAPTER ONEIntroduction
It was the same during the Great Plague of London in 1665–6. As the Covid-19 virus spread in the early months of 2020, and London began to shut down, wealthy families fled the city for their sanctuaries in the country. Others took to their yachts or flew to Caribbean islands. Estate agents fielded inquiries from the super-rich for ‘mansions with bunkers’.1 Newspaper stories reporting the flight of the rich attracted a torrent of bitter and cynical comments from the public. The author Lynsey Hanley captured the mood.
Our experiences of the lockdown are shaped by class. How can they not be, when the rich have escaped to second homes, when bus drivers and nurses are dying on their jobs, and when our ability to tolerate large amounts of time at home or to properly self-isolate is determined by how much space we have at our disposal?2
It was the same in the United States, with an exodus from New York’s up-market districts to the Hamptons, the vacation playground of the rich and famous. One wealthy philanthropist who joined the migration from the city wondered whether, with the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, she and her friends would ever return.3
In July 2021, Sydney was in the grip of its worst outbreak of the pandemic and struggling to cope with its highest daily caseload on record. The whole city was in lockdown: workplaces and schools were closed to all but essential workers and movement around the city was strictly limited. The worst affected local government area was Fairfield, the city’s most disadvantaged, with extensive poverty and high levels of low-paid work in essential services such as retail, care work and warehousing.4 As it reeled from burgeoning case numbers, Fairfield also had among the lowest vaccination rates in the state, and not because of vaccine hesitancy. The New South Wales government imposed a much stricter lockdown on Fairfield and the surrounding local government areas than on the rest of Sydney and the state. Students in the area were being schooled at home, many in situations where both parents were working and education levels were low.5 Home schooling was pushing many of them to breaking point.
It was a different story for children at Sydney’s elite private schools. As experts worried that school students in Fairfield were falling further behind, students at Scots College, an exclusive private school, were permitted by the government, in an apparent exemption from the lockdown restrictions, to travel to the school’s outdoor education campus in the picturesque Kangaroo Valley for a six-month camp. There, Year 9 students would undergo ‘a rite of passage into manhood’, according to the school’s website, a place where they would be ‘challenged physically, spiritually, emotionally, socially and academically’, developing in a way that ‘would set Scots boys apart’.6
Soon after, students at the elite private school Redlands (Sydney Church of England Coeducational Grammar School, where fees for senior students are A$42,000 per year) were permitted by the NSW government to travel to their Jindabyne campus, in the snowfields of the Snowy Mountains. Over their third term, at a cost of an additional A$17,000 each, students of Years 9 and 10 would combine intensive study with eleven hours a week of ski or snowboard training from qualified instructors and race coaches, opening doors for students interested in a career of competitive international snow sports.7
In July 2021, a surge in Delta strain case numbers prompted the Australian government to halve the number of Australians permitted to enter Australia from abroad each week. Thirty thousand citizens were stuck overseas on a waiting list to fly home to Australia.8 Among them, stranded in India, were more than two hundred unaccompanied Australian children who had travelled to India with their grandparents before the border closures and had been unable to reunite with their parents since.9
At the same time, stories were emerging about wealthy individuals and celebrities experiencing no such barriers. Flying into Australia on private jets, they were granted exemptions from state-controlled quarantine in designated hotels and instead allowed to sequester themselves in luxury homes and estates.10
These incidents, widely reported and discussed in the community, soured the euphoric feeling of ‘we are all in this together’ that had marked the opening weeks of the pandemic restrictions. It seemed to many that the veil had been lifted, revealing the ways people with privilege can bend or sidestep rules that apply to the rest of the community. The public expressed dismay and anger at news stories about special treatment for wealthy businesspeople and celebrities. They resented it when children at elite private schools left the city for retreats while students at public schools in less affluent suburbs suffered at home, learning online in cramped conditions while their parents buckled under the strain of work and care. Social media and media comment sites lit up with aggravation. ‘This surely is a joke.’ ‘One rule for them another for the rest of us.’
In short, the pandemic and lockdown experience suggested that a minority of people in privileged positions were granted special benefits and rights withheld from the rest. Watching this unfold prompted us to ask, ‘How does that work?’ ‘What are its social impacts?’ This book is our attempt to answer these questions.
§
When we stop to consider it, elite privilege is a richly complex object of study. Yet as a social phenomenon it is under-researched.11 It’s true that research related to elite privilege is extensive – including studies of inequality, the role of exclusive schools, luxury consumption practices and money in politics. But elite privilege as such has received little scholarly attention. The absence of critical attention serves to normalise it, to allow the practices and norms that sustain it to go unchallenged, and to disguise its social impacts.
Using evidence drawn mainly from contemporary Australia, our goal is to make visible the characteristics of elite privilege, the beliefs, attitudes and processes that underlie its reproduction, and its effects. What, in fact, is elite privilege? Is it coterminous with wealth or with influence or power? How, exactly, is elite privilege used to evade rules? How do elites signal that a benefit is to be granted to them and why do others respond by bestowing it on them? What are the ways by which social institutions and political structures sustain elite privilege? What are the emotional and practical effects of elite privilege on people at different levels of the socio-economic spectrum? What is the relationship between elite privilege, social exclusion and economic inequality?
While there are extensive bodies of literature on male privilege and white privilege, our focus is on elite privilege, the advantages and benefits conferred on the basis of having wealth or influence. Of course, elite privilege is interwoven with and amplified by male privilege and white privilege, giving rise to complex questions of ‘intersectionality’, which we consider later. Even so, we will argue that the distinctiveness of elite privilege is occluded when it is corralled with more common usages of ‘privilege’. Nevertheless, we will see that recent work on male and white privilege can shed new light on the dynamics of elite privilege.
In the last decade or two, reflecting sharp increases in inequality, considerable scholarly attention has been directed to the super-rich or the ‘one percent’. Thomas Piketty’s work Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) supercharged the debate.12 Piketty’s historical data on the accumulation of greater wealth by elites led him to write of the emergence of a new ‘patrimonial capitalism’.13 The renewed interest is a return to questions of distribution after some decades in which social researchers had been preoccupied by questions of identity or recognition.14 The surge of interest in the super-rich has concentrated on how they accumulate wealth and how they spend it, with some attention to the ways the wealthy shape policy and social arrangements to their own advantage.
Welcome as this new scholarship is, elite privilege is not the same as wealth. While often associated with wealth, elite privilege refers to the exclusive advantages and benefits that are socially conferred. These advantages are associated not just with wealth but with influence, two resources that are often but not always coupled. Two people with the same fortune can enjoy quite different levels of elite privilege, and some people with limited wealth enjoy many privileges. Elites in politics, media, the professions, academia and culture, where high status need not be linked to wealth, often enjoy extensive privileges. The cultural elite, for example, includes celebrities whose cultural influence may give them privileged status and access, irrespective of their wealth. An economic approach to studying elite privilege, therefore, limits our understanding. So, while our primary focus will be on wealthy elites, it is not their economic assets as such that are of most interest. And we keep in mind elites in other fields where forms of ‘capital’ other than wealth allow them to receive privileges denied to everyone else.
§
In this book, we argue that, to understand elite privilege, it is not so much who elites are or what elites have that is of most interest but the way privilege works – that is, the social practices and processes by which advantages and benefits are conferred on those with wealth and influence. It is these processes and practices that sustain, reproduce and legitimise elite privilege. Our focus, therefore, is on the social practice and social effects of elite privilege. Existing work on the composition of the privileged elite and what they possess (wealth and influence) is focused on the privileged elite themselves. The practice of privilege is less well understood. Where studies have examined the practice of privilege, in most cases the focus remains on the actions and activities of those at the top, such as their consumption behaviours. In contrast, we argue that the practice and reproduction of privilege is a process that spans social strata.
Our emphasis on the practices of privilege arises from the thought that privileges do not appear magically just because someone has money or power. Privileges are granted or bestowed by others every day. Elite privilege is sustained through broad social compliance with demands for privileged treatment and toleration of the institutions and norms essential for its reproduction. In other words, elite privilege should be regarded not as a mere by-product or perquisite of wealth and influence but as an organising principle in society, a set of social practices that sorts and reproduces social strata. The alchemy of these processes, how privilege is performed in interpersonal interactions and social relationships, is a central concern of this study. We take as our starting point the array of interpersonal, situational and institutional interactions and processes across the social strata through which privilege is ‘done’.
Consequently, elite privilege is not just a private matter, something ‘they’, the elites, enjoy. Privilege is a social issue that involves and concerns everyone. First, everyone sustains the system of privilege by participating in the granting of privileges, whether that be in our daily interactions, our involvement in institutions that benefit elites, or our participation in broader social and political processes that underpin elite privilege. Secondly, in various ways, elite privilege causes harm. In the closing chapters, we identify three kinds of harm arising from elite privilege – psychic, economic and social harms – although the harms are implied throughout much of the analysis to follow.
§
In understanding how elite privilege operates as an organising principle, we sometimes use the analogy of a machine to draw attention to the social ‘machinery’ that sustains, reproduces and legitimises elite privilege. This machinery of privilege is comprised of the social practices and norms that confer exclusive advantages and benefits in patterned ways at the interpersonal and institutional levels to reproduce disparities of power, wealth, status and influence. Individuals, groups, organisations and institutions all play a role as ‘cogs’ or ‘wheels’ in this machine, but the parts most fundamental to its operation are institutions. We argue that most of a nation’s important institutions, such as schools, the labour market, the legal system and a host of others are organised in ways that generate exclusive benefits and advantages to those who already have wealth and influence and deny those benefits to others.
This machinery of privilege prevents the ideals of meritocracy from being realised. Western societies proclaim their meritocratic ideals, and there is a broad consensus that we are working towards greater fairness and equality of opportunity for everyone, albeit with problems and setbacks along the way.15 For gender and race, Western societies have indeed seen greater equality over the last five or six decades.16 By law, and often in practice, women, people from culturally diverse backgrounds, and other minorities have more equal access to domains previously reserved for straight white men – domains including professions (from medicine and law to trades and professional sports), political office (from local mayors to national leaders), literature and the arts, universities, corporate executive positions, boardrooms, country clubs, and so on. However, we argue, the machinery of privilege has ensured that nepotism and hereditary advantage remain embedded in institutions, thwarting the aims of equality of opportunity and co-opting ‘merit’ to conceal the ways it strengthens and reproduces elite power.
Our objective is to make visible this machinery of privilege – to reveal how it is entrenched in institutions, the forms it takes, and its manifestation in a wide range of relationships and interpersonal interactions, all in ways that sustain hierarchical societies resistant to challenge. The more one looks, the more one sees that every member of society is a cog in the machine, helping to keep the engine turning over smoothly and generating its outputs – exclusive benefits for elites. The durability of the machinery of privilege explains why liberal democratic societies remain enduringly stratified and unfair and will continue to be so until sand is thrown into its gears.
§
A guide to the book’s structure will help. In chapter 2 we explain what we mean by ‘elites’ and ‘elite privilege’, drawing on a combination of qualitative data on the perceptions and experiences of people from different socio-economic backgrounds and on the theoretical tools in the existing literature. Here, we rely on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, especially the distinctions between economic, social and cultural capital.
In chapter 3, we start our examination of the practice of privilege by exploring everyday interpersonal interactions, what we call the micropolitics of privilege. We explore the relational processes that underlie the conferral of privilege in everyday social interactions.
While the micropolitics are important, the components most fundamental to the operation of the machinery of privilege are institutions. Chapters 4 to 7 consider the role of certain sites where elite privilege is sustained, reproduced and legitimised. They explore the social practices and norms conferring special advantages that are embedded in each of the institutions and how they are oriented towards reproducing disparities in wealth and influence. The first site (in chapter 4) is elite suburbs and elites’ relationship to space. Beyond simply localities where the rich live, these neighbourhoods are places where privilege is ‘consecrated’ and where forms of capital are actively accumulated. Chapter 5 investigates exclusive private schools, where elite privilege is passed on to the next generation. They are places where forms of capital are transubstantiated, facilitating greater accumulation of power and influence. In the machinery of privilege, exclusive private schools may be seen as the engine.17Chapter 6 reports the ways in which the privileged status absorbed through elite private schooling radiates out to other social institutions, such as the arts, sport, the honours system and the judiciary. We show that the gains in gender and ethnic diversity in some of these institutions sit alongside declines in ‘class diversity’ over recent decades.
The final site for the cultivation of elite privilege, philanthropy, may seem surprising (chapter 7). However, on closer inspection, the fascinating world of elite philanthropy turns out to be a vital field for the consolidation of elite power and the extension of elite influence into society.
Across these sites, the role of social capital is essential to the operation and reproduction of elite privilege and power. Chapter 8 looks more closely at the networks formed and reformed by elites and the ways they serve to protect and advance their influence, both individually and collectively. It also considers more directly a phenomenon that has appeared periodically in the text – the relationship between elite privilege and other kinds of privilege.
While the operation of the machinery of privilege across many of society’s institutions is detailed in the first half of the book, in practice that machinery is often veiled. In chapter 9, we analyse how elite privilege is concealed or justified as benign, such as by the spread of individualist ideology and narratives of deservingness.
Chapters 10 and 11 consider the second question raised early in this introduction, that of the social effects of elite privilege. They clarify the harms imposed by elite privilege on others and society – the psychological harms such as everyday slights and humiliations, the economic harms visited on others when elites exploit their advantages, and the corrosion of social cohesion and civic values when privilege is allowed to flourish. In the last chapter, we ask what might be done to curb elite privilege, offering several proposals that may be steps on the way to more just and harmonious societies.
§
‘Researching up’ provides practical and ethical challenges.18 Firstly, elites are ‘notoriously difficult’ to gain access to, so the inner workings of elite groups are more difficult to study.19 They are skilled at protecting themselves from unwelcome intrusions; after all, policing boundaries defines their status. If access is gained, the subjects can often ‘set the terms for being studied, manipulate research results, and control dissemination.’20 Ethnographic researchers need to be able to manage the interpersonal power relations and possess the right cultural characteristics to gain the trust of the rich. (In her study of super-yacht buyers, Emma Spence wrote that, ‘in order to identify and engage with the superrich, I found that as a researcher I must possess, or develop, sufficient cultural capital’).21 In addition, wealthy elites have lawyers and PR experts at their disposal, and they know people in positions of power, such as newspaper editors, grant-makers and senior politicians. Nevertheless, a few elite researchers have penetrated the barriers and exposed to the rest of society how elements of the system of privilege work, and we draw on their research.
Even so, research has shown that one cannot rely on what elites say about their own privilege. As Shamus Khan and Colin Jerolmack write, ‘the narratives that they construct in an interview are at odds with situated behavior.’22 In their interviews with students at elite schools, they found that most students had a well-rehearsed narrative of achievement through hard work. Yet their observational research indicated that the students do not work hard ‘and actually marginalize the few that do.’ These students learn from an early age to rhetorically embrace meritocracy, and their schools, whose campuses are monuments to privilege, constantly reinforce the message. Posturing, suggest Khan and Jerolmack, ‘is at times an exquisite art.’23 It’s also an acquired form of cultural capital. When the rich and powerful are interviewed for newspaper profiles, adopting a certain persona is the default disposition.
Adam Howard and Jane Kenway commented on the risks of alienating those one is studying – in the research process itself and by publishing discomforting papers and books.24 Academic researchers who study elites may have a legitimate fear that those they study will use the law or their friendships with university executives, media editors and politicians to punish the researchers for writing critically of them. Still, as Gaztambide-Fernández writes, ‘risk-taking is at the heart of what it means to be engaged in social justice efforts through research.’25
Finally, for some affluent, highly educated researchers, studying elite privilege may produce the ‘personal cringe’ that comes with recognising in themselves some of the discomforts and rationalisations that the elites sometimes display, a cringe that challenges objectivity and calls for a measure of ‘dis-identification’.26
§
This book draws on a wide range of scholarly research bearing on elite privilege, augmented in the first instance with data gathered from government documents released under freedom of information laws, media stories of various kinds, and public reactions to manifestations of privilege across news and social media sites. Most of the evidence used to make our argument is drawn from Australia, although we often refer to studies from the United States, Britain and various European countries. We think that the contours of the argument we develop about elite privilege can be adapted, with allowances for national variations of history, economic structure and culture, to describe most developed countries. The rules of the game are broadly the same, whether they concern ‘the micropolitics of privilege’, the function of expensive suburbs, the role of elite schools, or the way the power of wealth is amplified through philanthropy.
For this study, new Australian evidence concerning perceptions of privilege and reactions to it has been generated by a specially commissioned public opinion survey of 1,229 adults. The details, including the interview schedule, are in Appendix 1. After collecting respondents’ demographic data, including the type of high school they attended (public or private, high-fee or low-fee), the survey explored beliefs about wealthy people finding ways around rules, whether it’s OK to use connections to get around the rules, and how they feel when wealthy people or celebrities are given special treatment. They were asked whether they have felt ashamed about where they live, the school they attended or their parents’ occupation, and whether mention of the school they attended helped or harmed their chances of getting a job. They were also asked whether they believe the rules are applied fairly or whether there are different rules for the rich. Finally, they were asked how they see the role of elite private schools.
Deeper insights into public perceptions of privilege have been drawn from a series of discussions carried out for this study in eight focus groups. The details of focus group recruitment are in Appendix 2. The participants, recruited from Melbourne and Sydney residents, ranged over younger and older cohorts and were divided between those with average incomes and wealth and those with high incomes and wealth (referred to in the text as ‘average income’ and ‘wealthier’). The ‘wealthier’ participants owned assets, excluding the residential home, worth at least A$3 million, so few were among the very wealthy elite who are the focus of this study (the kind of person unlikely to join a focus group). We found, however, that, with jobs such as lawyer, tax consultant, doctor, finance manager and asset manager for philanthropists, our participants had had personal contact with the very rich and personal exposure to exclusive schools and were therefore able to offer insights into the world of elite privilege.
The focus groups explored understandings of the nature of privilege, beliefs about how fairly rules are applied, perceptions of unfair access to benefits and rights, attitudes towards elite schooling, and feelings of anger, shame and resentment at one’s social position in a stratified society. The transcripts provide 250 pages of new data on this complex subject.
Summary
The differing experiences of the pandemic and lockdowns, in which privileged people seemed to be able to bend or sidestep the rules, caused widespread resentment. This book aims to make visible the practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterise elite privilege and allow its reproduction. Elite privilege, a richly complex subject, is under-researched. Our focus is on privilege associated with wealth and influence rather than with male and white privilege, although in practice elite privilege is entangled with male and white privilege.
We make two main arguments. First, we want to know how privilege works as a social phenomenon – the practices and processes by which it is sustained, reproduced and legitimised. Privileges should be regarded not as the by-product of wealth and power but as an organising principle in society. Secondly, elite privilege is not just a private matter but is a social issue. We all sustain the system of privilege by participating in the granting of privileges, directly or by involvement in systems that grant privileges. In addition, we are all harmed by elite privilege. The experience of privilege is therefore not confined to those at the top who have it; it is a force that conditions and influences all strata of society.
Finally, the system of privilege can be thought of as a machine that reproduces disparities of wealth and power. The machinery of privilege, or social practices and norms that confer exclusive advantages and benefits in patterned ways at the interpersonal and institutional levels, counteracts the ideals of meritocracy and is the means by which elites continue to use nepotism and hereditary advantage to remain at the top.
Notes
1
Rupert Neate, ‘Super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak’,
The Guardian
, 12 March 2020; Jessica Green, ‘Farewell poor people: how the rich are fleeing London – as millionaires offer up to £50,000-a-month to rent rural retreats’,
Daily Mail
, 24 March 2020.
2
Lynsey Hanley, ‘Lockdown has laid bare Britain’s class divide’,
The Guardian
, 7 April 2020.
3
Joshua Chaffin, ‘“The rich shouldn’t feel like the enemy”: is New York turning on the wealthy?’,
Financial Times
, 6 April 2021.
4
See Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘ABS releases measures of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage’, 16 March 2008,
https://tinyurl.com/52ht8b3h
.
5
Sarah McPhee, ‘Schools email parents about “significant” increase in students attending class’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 1 August 2021.
6
See ‘A unique outdoor education exclusive to Scots’,
https://scots.college/visit-scots/campuses/glengarry/
; Michael McGowan, ‘Students from exclusive Sydney school relocate to regional NSW campus during lockdown’,
The Guardian
, 14 July 2021.
7
Jordan Baker, ‘Redlands students escape lockdown for Snowy Mountains ski school’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 19 July 2021.
8
Sam Clench, ‘“People just don’t care”: Australians stranded overseas come to terms with their own country “abandoning” them’,
News.com.au
, 13 July 2021.
9
Tiffany Wertheimer, ‘India Covid pandemic: Girl, 5, reunited with mother in Australia’,
BBC News
online, 18 June 2021; Herlyn Kaur, ‘Six-year-old girl stuck in India amid COVID pandemic leaves Perth family with nervous wait’, ABC News online, 9 July 2021.
10
Caitlin Fitzsimmons, ‘15,000 rich foreigners given visas to Australia during the pandemic’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 1 August 2021; Bryant Hevesi and Andrew Prentice, ‘Australia’s richest man is allowed to skip quarantine in notoriously strict Western Australia despite the billionaire mining mogul having tested positive to coronavirus’,
Daily Mail
, 21 January 2021; Carrie Fellner and Nigel Gladstone, ‘Thousands enter Australia for “holidays and business” as wait drags for stranded locals’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 1 July 2021; Caitlin Fitzsimmons, ‘Pandemic no barrier to private jet arrivals in Australia’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 30 May 2021.
11
Alan France, Steve Roberts and Bronwyn Wood, ‘Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: towards a new research agenda for youth sociology’,
Journal of Sociology
, 54/3 (2018): 362–80, at p. 370.
12
Thomas Piketty,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.
13
Ibid., p. 173.
14
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth,
Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange
. London: Verso, 2003.
15
We believe our argument applies,
mutatis mutandis
, to all liberal democratic societies. We are not sufficiently expert to comment on its applicability to other kinds of societies. Compared with the post-war decades when it was enthusiastically promoted as the means to build a more equal society, today meritocracy is more often offered as a fig leaf. The mobilisation of meritocracy as a defence of inequality is done half-heartedly, perhaps because the demands for a fairer society have lost much of their fervency in the neoliberal era – that is, in the absence of a powerful alternative to liberal capitalism.
16
See chapter 6, note 1.
17
Indeed, in their book focused on private schools in Britain, Francis Green and David Kynaston describe these schools as ‘engines of privilege’ (
Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem
. London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
18
William Harvey, ‘Strategies for conducting elite interviews’,
Qualitative Research
, 11 (2011): 431–41.
19
Rachel Sherman, ‘“A very expensive ordinary life”: consumption, symbolic boundaries and moral legitimacy among New York elites’,
Socio-Economic Review
, 18/2 (2018): 411–33, at p. 415.
20
Adam Howard and Jane Kenway, ‘Canvassing conversations: obstinate issues in studies of elites and elite education’,
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
, 28/9 (2015): 1005–32, at p. 1007.
21
Emma Spence, ‘Eye-spy wealth: cultural capital and “knowing luxury” in the identification of and engagement with the superrich’,
Annals of Leisure Research
, 19/3 (2016): 314–28, at p. 315.
22
Shamus Khan and Colin Jerolmack, ‘Saying meritocracy and doing privilege’,
Sociological Quarterly
, 54/1 (2013): 9–19, at p. 11.
23
Ibid., p. 12.
24
Howard and Kenway, ‘Canvassing conversations’, p. 1008.
25
Quoted ibid., p. 1015.
26
France, Roberts and Wood, ‘Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes’, p. 370.
CHAPTER TWOUnderstanding Elite Privilege
Who are the elites?
Any study of ‘elite privilege’ should begin by describing what we mean by ‘elite’ and ‘privilege’. Defining the various elites may appear easy but is, in fact, troublesome, not least when attempting to establish boundaries between elite and non-elite groups.1 Some clues might be provided by the membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, described as the ‘most secretive and exclusive club for the top echelon of business leaders, politicians, high court judges and triple-A gold-plated celebrities’.2 Membership is said to be ‘the ultimate status symbol, an acknowledgement of power and prestige’. Invitations, approved by the Qantas chairman, are highly prized because they are offered to a select few, those whom the airline’s specialists assess as being the most influential in the country.
Money alone won’t get you in, nor will the lack of it stop you, and there is no membership fee. What it is about is that most desirable and intangible of all assets – influence. If you’ve got muscle – corporate, financial, political, sporting – you’ve got a chance.3
When members pass through the unmarked doors of the lounges they walk into a rarefied atmosphere – quiet, spacious, tastefully decorated and with discreet, professional customer service. ‘When you arrive in the lounge’, one member revealed, ‘they ask if you would like a massage or a spa, or if you’d like to book a meal.’4 Another described the lounge as ‘a revolving door’ of industry and government leaders. ‘You’ll go into the lounge and every time you will see someone you know. It’s people in business very similar to you.’5
Arguably, the experts at Qantas who select those invited to join the club know more than anyone about identifying Australia’s elites. Although other airlines have invitation-only exclusive status cards – BA has Executive Club Premier, American Airlines has ConciergeKey and Emirates hand delivers a card to those chosen for its iO status – Qantas seems to explicitly target the nation’s power elite.6
How Qantas identifies the most influential among the power elite is ‘a tightly guarded secret’.7 It’s likely to involve more art than science and to be biased towards those who can contribute to the airline’s commercial interests. In this book we will use a moveable definition of ‘elite’ depending on the context, albeit with an emphasis on the wealthiest.8 Reflecting sharp increases in inequality in recent decades, attention has been drawn to the ‘the one percent’ of top wealth owners. Thomas Piketty’s pioneering work points to the disproportionate growth in the wealth of the top centile (the 1 per cent) and the top tenth of the one percenters (the 0.1 per cent). Both, and even more so for the top 0.1 per cent, derive their income and wealth not from salaries but from returns to capital – dividends, interest and capital gains.9 Below the 1 per cent, among the top 9 per cent of income earners we find ‘doctors, lawyers, merchants, restauranteurs, and other self-employed entrepreneurs’.10 But, as long as they depend mainly on their wage and salary incomes, they will not be elevated in the stratosphere of the 1 per cent and certainly not the 0.1 per cent. Earned income is not enough.
In studying elite privilege, elites other than the rich ought to be included (we discuss three in a later section). In the extensive literature on elites in sociology and political science, the emphasis is on the power they exert.11 When the focus is on influence as well as power, to the wealthy elite must be added elites in the fields of business, politics, bureaucracy, media, academia and culture, those with enough status to gain exclusive access to resources or rights. Notice that the injustices of privilege are not delimited by inequalities of wealth and income, though they are often closely aligned with them.
Recognising privilege
Although there is an extensive literature on male and white privilege, the privilege of elites, although often mentioned, has received limited systematic attention. As a phenomenon it evades clear definition. Alison Bailey describes privilege as the unearned advantages of dominant groups, advantages systematically conferred by social institutions and beyond those available to marginalised citizens.12 Bob Pease adopts a similar approach in his compendium of kinds of privilege.13 The idea of its being unearned advantage is more helpful for describing privilege arising from differences in gender and race, categories that are more clear cut. For privilege due to differences in wealth and influence, the distinction between earned and unearned, like the distinction between deserving and undeserving, lies in a grey zone, both contestable and morally ambiguous. The public is divided over whether those with wealth are entitled to the advantages that go with it, with some – and not just the rich – believing that even great wealth can be earned – that is, justified – if it is obtained by hard work, thrift and virtuous behaviour, as we will see. We prefer the term ‘exclusive benefits’ to reflect the fact that the benefits, earned or unearned, are not available to people who lack sufficient status to be eligible to receive them.
When asked what privilege means, our focus group participants began with wealth and what it can buy. Privilege means ‘not having to worry about money,’ said one. They commented on the absence of obstacles and the opportunities open to the wealthy that are closed to others.
So when I think of privilege, I think of a lack of barriers, whether it’s education, travel, jobs. It’s a lack of barriers that you need to consider to do what you want and follow your dreams. (Ashley, average income, younger, Sydney)
Well, I suppose it means being able to go to the best schools, having private health cover, living in one of the more leafier suburbs. Just having more opportunities, I suppose, than some other people. (Farah, average income, older, Melbourne)
A second feature of privilege stressed in the literature is the set of qualities or psychological dispositions possessed by members of the elite. In their study of privilege in elite girls’ schools in the United Kingdom, Claire Maxwell and Peter Aggleton write:
The term ‘privilege’ can be used to describe the set of self-understandings, dispositions and worldviews observed among young people and families, who largely see power as natural or unquestioned. Privilege is connected both to a person (as a set of attributes or as an identity) and to being embedded within a particular space – in this case a private/elite school – which ‘shapes and interacts with subjects who cross or inhabit this terrain’.14
When asked how they recognise privileged people, focus group participants frequently stressed disposition and personal presentation. Many referred to their bearing or, as one put it, ‘having a certain way about you’.
I’m occasionally at a function and I can pretty much work out who the key players are relatively quickly, just in the way they carry themselves, the confidence they have. They certainly have an ability to speak with a level of confidence others potentially don’t have. (Mark, wealthier, older, Melbourne)
The way they present themselves or if they’re describing themselves to you, sometimes they like to talk about themselves more than ask you questions. (Luca, average income, younger, Sydney)
I think it’s a mixture of like dress, job, where they live, but then also how they hold themselves. (Ashley, average income, younger, Sydney)
These members of the public recognise privilege as embodied. Patterns of socialisation are written into the body; the external is internalised through largely unconscious imitation. Embodiment includes posture, stride, mannerisms, facial expressions, accent, and manner of speaking, a kind of muscle memory of class. These patterns are also inscribed in our mental habits, our ways of classifying and valuing the world, aesthetic appreciations, feelings and so on. As we will see, these internalised lessons from the past have a powerful role in shaping our future life course, much more than we care to admit in a society supposed to be meritocratic.
Observing girls at elite schools, Maxwell and Aggleton were struck by their ‘surety’ – that is, the sense of uniqueness and ‘confidence in their future educational and employment success’.15 Our focus group participants commented on the surety of the privileged elites. Josh (wealthier, younger, Sydney) had attended an elite private school and regarded himself as privileged. He spoke of the unconscious ‘assumptions that we build into ourselves, often granted to us by circumstance’. What kind of circumstance? ‘Birth mostly.’
… they’re usually confident I find and sure of themselves. (Farah, average income, older, Melbourne)
The way they talk, how they conduct themselves … a bit of a show off kind of a feel about them. (Phillip, average income, older, Melbourne)
Observations about how people hold themselves and exude confidence are akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus – that is, one’s preconscious disposition, bodily orientation, sense of self, tacit knowledge, cultural preferences and mastery of the subtle rules of the game.16 Although some not born to it attempt to simulate the habitus of the wealthy elite, these sensibilities are learned or, rather, absorbed in the family home and childhood milieu, including elite schools. Josh, from a wealthy but not super-rich family, found himself becoming friendly with an ‘extraordinarily wealthy’ family that inhabited another world: ‘I’ve had enough times by now with this family to build a rapport with them and to even get into some difficult political arguments with them. But you can never wipe away that smell of wealth’ (Josh, wealthier, younger, Sydney).
The correspondence between wealth and certain ways of being in the world are strong enough to give rise to cognitive dissonance when they appear to conflict. The apparent oxymoron ‘bogan billionaire’ or ‘boganaire’17 was applied to Nathan Tinkler – a working-class man who through luck and entrepreneurial flair found himself in possession of a fortune.18 Tinkler splashed out on racehorses, fast cars and McMansions, and when he lost his fortune, the media presented it as the tradie returning to his rightful place.
In addition to wealth and disposition, certain attitudes, beliefs and behaviours are often associated with privilege. It is the role of habitus, Riley notes, to translate different class positions into observable behaviour.19 Although there is some stereotyping, there is enough recognisable evidence to justify the assumptions, at least, according to our focus group participants.
I have a colleague … [and] when we were talking about saving for a house deposit, she was just saying, ‘Oh, my parents gave me 500 grand. Doesn’t everyone have that?’ (Drew, average income, younger, Sydney)
On the other hand, a few participants stressed that wealth and privileged attitudes do not necessarily go together.
You can have a very privileged attitude, a very privileged personality type, but actually don’t come from a privileged background in any way, shape or form. You know, one of the better expressions, you just might be an arrogant turd. (Ryan, average income, younger, Sydney)
And going the other way:
I work with a lot of philanthropists, a lot of people that have a lot of wealth and are giving it away. And they’re very humble and want to learn. (Hana, wealthier, older, Melbourne)
I’ve got a mate who’s a doctor, a specialist doctor. He definitely earns a hell of a lot more than I do. But he’s pretty down to earth and friendly. … But then I’ve met doctors in hospitals who are complete wankers as well. (Luke, average income, younger, Melbourne)
Some analysts focus on the relational nature of privilege. Alan France and others write of how it ‘reflects not only an individual’s wealth, but also access to institutional, social and intergenerational attributes of families within a specific field.’20 In the literature, ‘relational’ is used in two distinct ways: one refers to the relationship between the privileged and those deemed the Other; the second refers to the relationship between the privileged and the system that confers advantages on them.21 Our emphasis on the doing of privilege (explained in the next chapter) focuses on the relationship between members of elites that seek the award of privileges and those in a position to bestow privileges on them, whether the bestowers themselves are privileged or not.
Although the presence of ‘the Other’ was apparent in the focus group conversations, especially in the wealthier groups, boundaries between social strata are blurred, even at the very top of the wealth distribution, as the case of Nathan Tinkler indicates. In her study of American and French upper-middle classes, Michelle Lamont identifies three kinds of boundary between social strata, divisions that recurred repeatedly in our focus group conversations (as we’ll see).22 Socio-economic boundaries delineate social positions based on wealth, power and professional success. Cultural boundaries separate strata according to education, disposition, tastes and affinity to higher forms of culture. A moral boundary is drawn when superior moral qualities, such as honesty, reliability, trustworthiness and ‘character’, are expected of the wealthy elite. As we will see, we can map ‘moral geographies’ across cities, attributing value to people according to where they live.
Helpful concepts
As the membership of the Chairman’s Lounge attests, wealth alone, although it goes a long way, is not a necessary marker of elite status. A purely economic approach ignores elites in politics, public administration, the professions, media, culture and academia, ‘where the command of disproportionate resources is not always, or only, economic.’23 There are two elements of this. The first is the existence of other elites who gain privileges less from their wealth and more from their positions of power and influence. The second is the way in which types of capital other than financial can amplify the privileges associated with wealth.24
Elites are aggregations of powerful individuals drawn together by social, professional or cultural links. Thinking of them in this way allows us to notice that there are various elites mobilising resources or ‘types of capital’ in different social spaces or fields, even if they sometimes overlap in membership. Pierre Bourdieu distinguishes four types of capital – financial, social, cultural and symbolic. They provide a conceptual framework for looking beyond wealth (financial capital) to capture the roles of personal connections and influence networks (social capital), the dispositions, knowledge and behaviours required to reproduce and enhance privilege, status and wealth (cultural capital) and the awards, credentials and prestigious positions that signal esteem (symbolic capital). These forms of capital are fungible – that is, they can be converted into one another – although some are more liquid than others. (Cultural capital, for example, requires a long time to build, while fortunes can be made quickly.) These concepts, considered in more detail in the next section, provide a valuable framework in the chapters that follow.
Bourdieu, whose focus was on social stratification through cultural differences, saw financial capital ‘at the root of all the other types of capital’, which were only transformed and disguised forms of wealth.25 In our view, social and cultural capital have their own potency in particular fields, providing the leaders in those fields with access to privilege. Although they are rarely poor, some powerful elite figures are not necessarily wealthy. Political leaders, newspaper editors and certain kinds of academics and celebrities come to mind.
We use the notion of field, borrowed from Bourdieu, to refer to a social space of shared interests in which elites operate. Each field has its own culture, boundaries and rules of the game. The composition of capital owned by elites in differing fields varies. A newly minted billionaire may not have much cultural capital, but the director of the National Gallery would have a surfeit of it. As we will see, members of elites often mobilise their resources across several fields, competing and cooperating to improve their positions, accumulating more resources and privileges. An elite member influential in one field may have little influence in another. Elites in the law, politics, the civil service, media, culture and academia are likely to be awarded privileges in some settings, whereas in others their signalling of a status deserving of privileges may elicit little response. On the other hand, the cross-pollination and overlap among elites in different fields is at the centre of accumulating great power and influence. Although this conception may appear to be individualistic in its orientation, in fact it maintains that individuals exist within their collectivities of networks, conventions and rules.
Forms of capital
Among the most affluent, wealth is almost always paired with connections, influence and social esteem, assets essential to further accumulation of wealth. When asked how privilege works in practice, it is remarkable how often our focus group participants talked about ‘connections’ and ‘networks’. Hana (wealthier, older, Melbourne) spoke of her work with a charity that secures university scholarship for kids from disadvantaged suburbs. They do very well in their studies, she said. ‘But then to get the job, forget it, because they don’t have the parent connections. Because they’re South Sudanese, and to become a doctor or a lawyer they don’t have the connections … because they didn’t go to those schools.’
We will explore this networking among elites in our consideration of corporate boards and philanthropy. Bourdieu referred to these networks of personal relationships as social capital. The influence attached to wealth depends on the owner’s social capital, which has a multiplier effect on their financial capital. ‘The volume of social capital possessed by a given agent’, he wrote, ‘… depends on the size of the network of connections that he can effectively mobilize.’26 The purpose of certain exclusive clubs is to concentrate social capital and, in so doing, augment it. It’s possible that the continued exclusion of women from certain gentlemen’s clubs is motivated as much by a desire not to dilute the benefits of membership because women’s networks are seen to be less valuable to the men. The concentrated social capital of successful people in Qantas’s Chairman’s Lounge explains its allure. ‘It’s private and you get to catch up with people that you know’, confided one member, ‘and it’s a good opportunity to bump into people you may not have spoken to for a while.’27
Cultural capital refers to the elements of group identity that allow members to speak of ‘people like us’. It encompasses familiarity with the tastes, modes of dress, bodily disposition, manners, and the material belongings associated with a social stratum or class. Bourdieu proposed three forms of cultural capital – embodied in ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’, objectified in cultural goods such as paintings, books and monuments, and institutionalised in forms such as educational qualifications.28
Embodied cultural capital is assimilated from birth and is typically acquired unconsciously, making it second nature to the bearer. It can be embodied in the form of one’s bearing, cultivated gaze, poise and tastes.29 Less obviously, embodiment takes the form of an air of knowingness, of being at ease in the world.30 Ease, suggests Khan, is the ‘signature emotion’ of the privileged in an age of open access and meritocracy. It is similar to ‘surety’, a confidence absorbed at home and at school that one’s future in the world is assured.31 Maxwell and Aggleton found that surety is ‘bestowed through self-understandings originating with the self, the family and the school[, and it is] strongly supportive of a hierarchical sense of personal and social “difference” from others.’32 A girl attending an elite school in southern England made an unwittingly revealing comment about her parents: ‘my parents have brought us up to have manners and things … but they haven’t tried to make us anyone that we’re not, you know.’33
The distinction often made between old money and new money arises from the fact that ‘the link between economic and cultural capital is established through the mediation of the time needed for acquisition.’34
