Rethinking Class Conflict in American Society

Writing at the Financial Times today, Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, now available from Telos Press. Save 30% when you order your copy in our online store.

Any serious attempt to understand the US’s current impasse by moving outside the conventional framework should be welcome. The stale pairings of liberal and conservative, right and left, no longer cut it.

Joel Kotkin, an American academic and author, has come up with the unlikely proposal of understanding the country’s predicament in terms of class conflict. But his conception is a world away from the old socialist notion of a combative proletariat battling against an intransigent ruling class. Instead, his is an innovative attempt to rethink the main contours of US society.

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Now Available: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is delighted to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available. Purchase your copy today in our online store.

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.

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Joel Kotkin on America’s Disappearing Middle Class

The Daily Beast has posted an excerpt from Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, forthcoming from Telos Press. Read the full excerpt here and pre-order your copy of The New Class Conflict in our online store.

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Looking beyond Left and Right: Joel Kotkin on the Changing Dynamics of Class

In his forthcoming book The New Class Conflict, Joel Kotkin explores how the familiar social and political categories of the twentieth century—left and right, liberal and conservative—no longer correspond to the emerging divisions of the present day. Kotkin’s analysis insead focuses 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.

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Joel Kotkin and the New American Feudalism

At the National Review Online, Fred Bauer explores the rise of neofeudalism in American society, and in doing so he draws explicitly on the writings of Joel Kotkin, whose forthcoming book The New Class Crisis will be published by Telos Press on September 1. Pre-order your copy of The New Class Crisis today, and we will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

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