TELOSscope: The Telos Press Blog

Now Available for Pre-Order: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is happy to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on September 1, 2014. Pre-order your copy here, and we will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

The New Class Conflict is written largely from the point of view of those who are, to date, the losers in this class conflict: the middle class. This group, which Kotkin calls the yeomanry, has been the traditional bulwark of American society, politics, and economy. Yet under pressure from the ascendant Oligarchs and ever more powerful Clerisy, their prospects have diminished the American dream of class mobility that has animated its history and sustained its global appeal.

This book is both a call to arms and a unique piece of analysis about the possible evolution of our society into an increasingly quasi-feudal order. Looking beyond the conventional views of both left and right, conservative and liberal, Kotkin provides a tough but evenhanded analysis of our evolving class system, and suggests some approaches that might restore the middle class to its proper role as the dominant group in the American future.

About the Author

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and Executive Editor of the widely read website New Geography. An internationally recognized authority on global, economic, political, and social trends, Kotkin is the author, most recently, of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.