A well known chamber music virtuoso, commenting on the proper way to perform baroque music, wants to eliminate “bourgeois prejudices.” A libertarian book reviewer acclaims the “exciting” Marxist discovery of class rule behind the façade of political unity and boasts that Albert Jay Nock’s liberal thought offers the same “tang of realism.” These are two tiny examples of how “class” jargon and notions of class culture and struggle have pervaded our consciousness to the point where nobody seems able to imagine any possible alternative. How many thinking people today would allow themselves to be caught displaying a fleeting moment of sympathy for the “ruling classes”? That term has become a synonym for reprehensible motives, repressive power, and self-seeking politics, thus setting up its antonym, the “revolutionary class,” which stands for human emancipation, noble causes, the sacred struggle, etc. Class terminology goes back to the end of the eighteenth century, but attaching basic value judgments to specific classes stems from Marx, as does the idea that political community is an illusion and that “in reality” society is a battleground of warring classes.
So “we are all socialists now,” as Edward, then Prince of Wales, said back in 1895. It takes the courage of unshakable convictions to look at classes otherwise than in the blackwhite Marxian pattern. T. S. Eliot was one such man of courage. In his Notes toward the Definition of Culture he pointed out that culture is formed and maintained by ruling classes:
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