Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003

In Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, Robert Nozick explains how the school system sets budding intellectuals up for a fall:

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.

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