The relation between the elites and the hoi polloi - this term so ostensibly fashionable, in who it designates as speaker, not in who it refers to - has defined the analysis of political power and its exercise (and non-exercise) throughout human, and not least, Western scholarship, if it's not throwing oneself through an open arc of an observation.
More interesting, if one is interested in language or rather, how language is shaped (and not primarily shapes) the institutions of power and their constant regeneration (or eventual lack of the same) must then ask how these elites are perceived. In the current date, it seems more dangerous to cry out elites,
Dangerous, I say?
Who are then, these elites, and - to echo Tony Benn's question, which likewise seems dangerously unfashionable - how can we get rid of them - apart from the obvious answer (la lanterne; again the echo of blood and cruel and dysfunctional mob violence muffled by the supposed gentleness of the tongue)?
A member of the dreaded "elite"? Now or in the cherished, or perhaps blemished, '89?
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