The Moral Elites: With and Beyond Bourdieu and the Sociology of Morality

The use of the term ‘elite’ in both academia and the public sphere has steadily increased over the past decades. Typically, discussions about the elite are conducted in the space between two poles: The power elite and the cultural elite. The former has come under scrutiny as economic inequality rises, and politicians lose legitimacy. Elite researchers are mostly concerned with this elite, writing the prosopographies (collective biographies) of the economic and political elites – their reproduction, integration, or circulation. The cultural elite, on the other hand, has become a target of culture warriors on the right who dislike coastal elites and scientific experts who are perceived to transgress the private sphere in relation to issues such as face masks and the transition to green energy sources.

The discursive space of the debate corresponds to Pierre Bourdieu’s spatial model of society in which societal positions are distributed according to the amount and composition of cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984a). Bourdieu is the most influential theoretical inspiration for elite scholars, and his model of society forms the hermeneutical horizon for much elite scholarship (Maclean and Harvey, 2019). In recent decades, however, Bourdieu’s model has been criticized by scholars from the sociology of morality for its dualism and specifically for neglecting the moral dimension of social life (Evens, 1999; Lamont, 1992; Pellandini-Simányi, 2014; Sayer, 2005). This has led to an increased attention to the moral dimension in perceptions and constructions of race, class, and gender. While this research agenda has proven fruitful in terms of understanding how moral boundaries are constructed in everyday life, the empirical and theoretical implication has been that the focus of this scholarship has shifted away from elites to middle and lower classes as well as gender, race, and ethnicity, and from objective hierarchical relations to subjective social constructions.

The aim of this paper is to integrate the two research traditions to take the first steps toward a theory of ‘moral elites’. This conceptualization seeks to preserve the best of two worlds by building on the basis of the Bourdieusian theory: Social space consists of a plethora of homologous fields in which actors struggle for position based on their past experience (habitus), resources (capital), and within a more or less established set of ‘rules’ of the societal game. At the ‘top’ of social space we find a field of power in which elites negotiate principles of domination and exchange rates of capital. However, incorporating the critiques of the sociology of morality – Bourdieu’s neglect of morality, but also his lack of belief in the reflexive capacity of social actors, and his conflation of objective and subjective interests or position and strategy – I suggest that it is analytically fruitful to think in terms of a moral elite who relies on the well-known forms of capital but in certain situations are able to have these recognized as moral capital, who reflexively create classifications and boundaries between social groups, and whose position cannot be reduced to conscious or subconscious strategy.

I suggest that to see the fruitfulness of such a concept, we need only to look to the struggles over the ‘dominating principles of legitimation’ in relation to the measures taken against the Corona virus pandemic, the continued financial and economic crises, or the climate crisis. Here, experts, top bureaucrats, politicians, and populist representatives of ‘the people’ struggled not only for positions of power but for the position of moral authorities that incarnate the principles that will lead society safely through the turmoil. Reducing these elite positions to either cultural, economic, or power positions makes us unable to understand properly why they reach these positions and how they manage them.

In the paper, the concept of moral elite is leveraged on the backdrop of s literature review intended to show the fruitfulness of an integration of the two theory traditions – that to some extend is already suggested but not carried out by key sociologists of morality. I then introduce the basic building blocks for the concept lifted from Bourdieusian and sociology of morality scholars. These are then fleshed out in the subsequent chapters on the historical doubling of elites, elite publics, and the functions of moral elites: Classification and constitution.

Throughout the paper, I illustrate the analytical fruitfulness of the concept through a historical case study of one of the key features of the Nordic welfare model, namely universalism in social policy that first emerged in the late 19th century.