Ruminations of an Intellectual Proletarian

From the Academy

AQUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, the late Seymour Harris foretold the growth of an American intellectual proletariat: that is, a mass of much-schooled youngish people, many with doctorates, for whom there would be found no employment consonant with their learning (or at least with their conceit of learning). Just that already had occurred in Latin America and elsewhere, Professor Harris knew. The most serious of the consequences of such a misguided public policy is that it forms, unwittingly, a class potentially revolutionary—disappointed, resentful, and possessed of an exalted opinion of its own unrecognized talents. Burke defined Jacobinism as the revolt of the enterprising talents of a nation against its property.

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Russell Kirk

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From the Academy

AQUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, the late Seymour Harris foretold the growth of an American intellectual proletariat: that is, a mass of much-schooled youngish people, many with doctorates, for whom there would be found no employment consonant with their learning (or at least with their conceit of learning). Just that already had occurred in Latin America and elsewhere, Professor Harris knew. The most serious of the consequences of such a misguided public policy is that it forms, unwittingly, a class potentially revolutionary—disappointed, resentful, and possessed of an exalted opinion of its own unrecognized talents. Burke defined Jacobinism as the revolt of the enterprising talents of a nation against its property.