Elitecraft (Reactionary Fervour, Liberal Myth and a New Left Politics)

A radical rethinking of ‘elites’ as ideology and emancipatory alternatives

The elite isn't a class, it's an ideology. And it's remaking the political world.

The battle over elites is a defining struggle of our age, yet no one has explained how or why Left and Right share anti-elitist anger. We fixate on populism, but the real story is not the invention of ‘the people’ – it is the invention of ‘the elite.’

This book offers the first major analysis of elites as ideology, showing how the concept became one of the most powerful political fictions of our time, shaping Left, Right and mainstream politics. Refiguring anti-elitism and the ‘politics of privilege’ as a distinctive political logic, it offers a novel framework that distinguishes emancipatory, liberal and reactionary forms of anti-elitism, and traces their development through populist, fascist, neoliberal and social-democratic traditions.

Examining the post-2008 landscape, the book explains how Left and Right anti-elitisms converged, why liberal anti-elitism collapses into the very privilege it claims to challenge, and solves the puzzle of how attacks on ‘woke elites,’ appeals to the ‘Left Behind,’ and challenges to meritocracy came to drive both emancipatory and reactionary politics.

Finally, the book reconstructs a concept of elites and practice of emancipatory anti-elitism capable of challenging liberal and reactionary narratives while contributing to a renewed egalitarian, anti-capitalist politics for the twenty-first century.