Abstract
The word ‘elite’ is quickly going the way of the word ‘fascist’, often employed by those it denotes against their opponents. In October 2019, for example, US Senator Josh Hawley described a Washington Post reporter on Twitter as a ‘smug, rich liberal elitist’ – quite rich coming from the son of a prominent banker and a graduate of both Stanford and Yale universities. In similar vein, Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage received lavish funding from millionaire Arron Banks to denounce the ‘elite’ bureaucrats of the European Union. But scholars, too, are implicated in this process by their research priorities. Criminologists typically study murderers and rapists, not fraudsters and financiers; sociologists continue to explore the devastating effects of poverty, not the distorting effects of wealth; and historians, still in reaction to the ideological origins of their discipline, can prefer the history of subaltern peoples over their elite oppressors.
There is irony in the fact that one of the major recent texts to explore the nature of the elite hails from Sweden, a country regularly praised for higher levels of income and gender equality, but perhaps elite power can only be fully appreciated as abnormal from within a society that still largely adheres to Jantelagen (the ‘law of Jante’), a cultural code that condemns personal ambition. And so Eliter i Sverige: Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på makt, status och klass (Elites in Sweden: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Power, Status, and Class) proves revelatory not simply for its analysis of Swedish society but more for the framework it establishes for studying inequality in general. As the editors write in their introduction, ‘To study elites thus entails . . . studying power and the unequal division of resources’ (p. 12, translations by the reviewer).
The first three chapters revolve around education, with Ida Lidegran finding that, while in the past elites studied Latin and the humanities, today’s elite youth focus upon the sciences. However, ‘the choice of high school program does not always relate to an interest for scientific disciplines’. Instead, it is a combination of instruction focused upon fact, certified teachers, and classmates who went through the same process of selection that ‘makes an educational culture that is extremely desirable and manifestly difficult to substitute’ (p. 52). Next, Petter Sandgren explores how the emergence of boarding schools facilitated the creation of the modern Swedish upper class by offering a shared social space in which the children of the old aristocracy and the new economic elites could intermingle. ‘What boarding schools offer above all’, he writes, ‘is a socially insulated zone; they have, therefore, in large part the same history and follow the same logic as Swedish residential segregation’ (p. 85). Finally in this section, Mikael Holmqvist analyses how the frequency of dyslexia diagnoses at the exclusive Viktor Rydberg Gymnasium in Djursholm ‘accentuates the relation between teacher and student and places the student’s communicative and social abilities at the center’ of instruction, rather than reading skills (p. 108). This, he contends, threatens to replace an idealized (if imperfect) meritocracy with what Holmqvist, in the vein of Pierre Bourdieu, calls a ‘consecracy’, or the rule of the consecrated, in which ‘it is not important what you can do but rather what you are as a person’, in which personal aura substitutes for actual knowledge and ability (p. 115).
Despite official positions and policies of equality, Sweden still has a number of landed estates (herrgård), the subject of Tora Holmberg’s chapter, which contrasts the mobility of modern society with the fixity of a privileged life centered upon such estates. Likewise, Lena Sohl examines the paradoxes prevalent in the experience of women whose husbands’ careers take the family from Sweden for an extended time; from a feminist perspective, international travel for women can be regarded as a liberating pursuit, but for upper-class women following their husbands’ work, it can reinforce traditional family roles and heteronormativity.
The final four chapters examine specific issues of representation within elite circles, starting with Christofer Edling, Gergei Farkas, and Jens Rydgren’s quite informative piece exploring just how integrated elites are at the local level through their analysis of the social networks of elites within four different medium-sized municipalities in the Västra Götaland region. Next, Erik Bihagen, Magnus Nermo, and Lotta Stern interrogate the relative significance of family connections and competence in both the public and private sector, finding that ‘family connections and personality have greater significance within the private sector than in the public sector’, demonstrating that a reliance upon formal merits remains greater in the latter (p. 237). Although academia, as an elite network, is rather internationalized in the 21st century, Alireza Behtoui and Hege Høyer Leivestad find in Sweden that non-Swedes, especially those from outside Western Europe, fare much worse than their native or European counterparts, especially within the humanities, as opposed to more technical fields. Moreover, non-native academics typically end up not only in ‘peripheral workplaces’, or colleges and universities of lower standing, but also are encouraged to focus upon ‘peripheral subjects’, or ‘those areas that touch on migration, minorities, diversity, immigration, and integration’ (p. 269). Finally, Christina Garsten, Bo Rothstein, and Stefan Svallfors put policy professionals under the microscope, asking if they can be understood as unrecognized elite and if politicians’ increasing reliance upon this unelected cadre constitutes a threat to democracy.
Although Eliter i Sverige recognizes that ‘elite’ often functions as a term of relative standing and so examines social spheres such as mid-sized municipalities or academic departments, it does not obfuscate the threat posed by elite power in a cloud of relativism. As Göran Therborn observes in his conclusion, The sell-off of the welfare state and the establishment of private profit as the central goal for nearly all public, tax-financed operations has been a process typical of Swedish politics for the last 200 years – gradual, discrete, and arranged between the new and old elites.
However, he adds, this process ‘has not yet reached its fulfillment. With critical thinking and clear analytical language as a beginning, resistance remains possible’ (p. 318). And that is the benefit of a volume such as Eliter i Sverige, for it provides a framework – primarily through the discipline of sociology but also incorporating history and political science – for understanding exactly how elite power propagates and maintains itself at varying levels in society. Those who seek a cure must study the disease agent, and thus must scholars, as this book so capably argues, focus their attention upon political, economic, and social elites of this world in order to address the world’s many pressing needs.
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