Volume 27, Number 4 · March 20, 1980
The New Masters
By Michael Walzer
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power
by George Konrád, by Ivan Szelényi, translated by Andrew Arato, by Richard E. Allen
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 252 pp., $10.00
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class
by Alvin W. Gouldner
The Seabury Press, 121 pp., $8.95
When Shelley wrote that poets are 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world,' he was not speaking in metaphor. He meant that they really do discover, shape, and announce the moral law. But Shelley was not making a political claim. He did not mean that the power of poetry should be publicly recognized or that poets should occupy the offices of state. In its most general form, however, that latter claim is common enough: that the state should be ruled by its most visionary or at least by its most intelligent citizens, and that they should rule, not by accident or luck, but because of their vision and intelligence.
Review, 3212 words
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