The Critique of the Establishment

Abstract

In the British case the term Establishment has a specific meaning, beyond simply ‘those in charge’, ‘the highly paid’, or ‘the upper class’. The British Establishment is better defined as a small and flexible group of people able to renew itself by drawing on the ranks of an increasingly technocratic and aspirational middle-class. In this understanding of the term, the Establishment was subjected to a strong cultural critique during the period under question here, around 1956–1962, in a way that generated serious national challenges to the revived consensualism coming after the Second World War. The core of the Establishment is a small, connected network, not all of whom come from the ‘estated’ ranks of long-accumulated capital, but all of whom are willing to stand behind the instrumental interests of state capitalism. Its interconnectedness rose with the mature period of imperial administration: in 2002 Robert Colls quotes Sidney Webb’s 1886 observation that the group of people capable of making meaningful political decisions amounted to 2000 Londoners (Colls 2004: 90) — also exactly the figure given by Tom Nairn in the same year (Nairn 2002: 1–14). An awareness of the protean nature of this vestedness, however, booms in the 1950s with the technocratic opportunities offered by a new Welfare State.KeywordsEnglish LiteratureState CapitalismFree CinemaNaturalistic FallacyPolitical ClassThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.