Abstract

The populist critique of the New Class and its liberal agenda usually takes one of two lines of attack. The first, like MacIntyre's, “holds that liberal political theory accurately represents liberal social practice.” For populists to criticize liberal society, it is sufficient to take liberal theory on its own terms and accept the vision of subjectivity advocated by Locke, Smith or Bentham as true. That is, contemporary society is an aggregation of rational economic agents, existentially fragmented in an endless game of complex instrumental calculations. But, as Lasch points out, ordinary people do not want to live this way — a lifestyle they associate with New Class behavior.