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The rise of the ‘knowledge economy’ has empowered a new constellation of elites tied to fields like law, consulting, media, entertainment, finance, education, administration, science and technology. They traffic primarily in data, ideas, rhetoric and images instead of physical goods or services. Drawing from Bourdieu, we can refer to them as ‘symbolic capitalists.’
I’m a symbolic capitalist. There’s a good chance you are too.
One defining trait of symbolic capitalists is our commitment to social justice. We are the Americans most likely to self-identify as feminists, antiracists or allies to LGBTQ people. Politically, we’re overwhelmingly aligned with America’s primary ‘left’ party.
Nonetheless, inequalities in the U.S. have grown increasingly pronounced as symbolic capitalists have risen in affluence and influence. Symbolic capitalists are, themselves, among the primary beneficiaries of these inequalities and social justice discourse is increasingly mobilized to justify them. The ‘losers’ in the knowledge economy are portrayed as deserving their lot because they think, feel or say the ‘wrong’ things about race, gender and sexuality. Elites’ bids for more power and status, meanwhile, are increasingly bound up with their egalitarian bona fides.
Understanding this state of affairs requires a deep and unflinching look into the history and political economy of symbolic capitalists. This is the task of my first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, which will be published on October 8, 2024 by Princeton University Press (pre-order now!).
Symbolic Capital(ism) will not be cover the same ground as the book. It will, however, serve as a forum for exploring adjacent themes and ideas — touching on issues that were not covered in the text, extending the themes of the book to additional cases, further developing implications and applications of the book’s arguments, and responding to questions and criticisms. The newsletter will also serve as a laboratory for testing key themes, arguments and findings for the follow-up text, currently in development.
We Have Never Been Woke focuses on symbolic capitalists. The follow up book will turn the analytic lens away from the “winners” in the knowledge economy towards those who perceive themselves to be the “losers.” It’ll demonstrate that the “crisis of expertise,” the rise of Trump, contemporary tensions around “identity” issues — these are all fronts in the same basic struggle. The “diploma divide,” the “gender divide,” and the “urban / rural divide,” in politics are likewise proxies for the same core struggle, being waged between mainstream symbolic capitalists and people who feel sociologically distant from folks like “us.”
Bottom line: if you’re a fan of my public-facing essays exploring social justice, inequality or the symbolic economy, if you’re eager to get your hands on We Have Never Been Woke, or if you’re interested to see where things go next — you should definitely subscribe to Symbolic Capital(ism).
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**The image from this Substack was produced by Shane Conway in a journal article applying Bourdieu’s ideas about symbolic capital and symbolic violence to understand challenges faced by family farmers — published in the Journal of Rural Studies. You can check out the paper here.
