In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobbery... meets its match here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are both... forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Snobbery is not the same thing as pride of class. Pride of class may not please us but we must at least grant that it reflects a s...ocial function. A man who exhibited class pride--in the day when it was possible to do so--may have been puffed up about what he was, but this ultimately depended on what he did. Thus, aristocratic pride was based ultimately on the ability to fight and administer. No pride is without fault, but pride of class may be thought of as today we think of pride of profession, toward which we are likely to be lenient. Snobbery is pride in status without pride in function. And it is an uneasy pride of status. It always asks, "Do I belong--do I really belong? And does he belong? And if I am observed talking to him, will it make me seem to belong or not to belong?" It is the peculiar vice not of aristocratic societies which have their own appropriate vices, but of bourgeois democratic societies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »