Arnold Kling cites Alan S. Kahan on the honeymoon and divorce between intellectuals and capitalism:
To put it baldly, since capitalism undermined aristocracy, it was a good thing from an intellectual’s point of view.
Kling continues:
Kahan’s history is that as long as aristocrats at birth were important, intellectuals as a class had something to gain by bringing down these aristocrats, and promoting capitalism did that. Once the birth aristocracy weakened and a strong business class emerged, anti-capitalism became the more natural ideology of the intellectual class. Remember the Masonomic view that politics is about relative group status. Intellectuals aspire to the status of the clergy and aristocracy in Kahan’s view. Klein raises the question of what accounts for those of us who claim to be intellectuals yet are pro-capitalist. Well, we’re outliers.
It’s not a new idea.
Perhaps. It also seems likely that as the number of people in the intellectual class has expanded (relative to the size of the population), the average quality of intellectuals has declined. Just as during the dot-com boom, the number of companies in the space meant that there were people with CEO jobs who shouldn’t have been running a lemonade stand.
So, as the quality of the intellectual class has declined, intellectuals have moved away from the ideas we hold? It has a certain appeal — a dangerous appeal.