By Shay O’Brien (Harvard University)

Title: Born to Ruleby Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves

“One of the perennial problems in writing about elites,” Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (p. 6) observe in their new book, “is figuring out exactly who you’re talking about.” Indeed, this is the first question for any study of the “elite:” who are they, anyway? Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (Harvard University Press, 2024) is one of the best answers to that deceptively simple question that has ever been crafted. The authors have gathered 125 years of data from the British Who’s Who to produce a beautifully written, methodologically dazzling portrait of the U.K. positional elite over time.

Born to Rule is threaded with well-chosen case studies, which make this complex analysis a joy to read. The authors begin with Henry, an elite-born elite lawyer who insisted he was not an elite. “‘Complete rubbish,’” he said when asked (1). They conclude with Hugh, another elite-born elite lawyer who was in the Who’s Who fifty years prior, and who “breezily” described his powerful job and cosseted upbringing (221). The contrast between Henry and Hugh neatly illustrates their overarching empirical finding: British elites may have changed the way they describe themselves over the past 125 years, but their actual backgrounds have barely budged. The distance between contemporary elites’ efforts to appear “ordinary” and the reality that they are typically elite-born and elite-educated is the driving tension of the book. And it is not an exclusively British tension. A similar struggle to appear “ordinary” in the face of privilege runs through a number of ethnographies of the contemporary U.S. elite, including Sherman’s Uneasy Street, Khan’s Privilege, and Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness.

Sociologists of culture will be especially interested in Chapter 3, which explores this tension as it plays out in elite cultural expression. The chapter begins with a concise overview of the rich tradition of research on elite cultural distinction. It then presents a change-over-time story about British elite cultural lives since 1850, and offers an explanation for our contemporary “culture omnivore” era of elite distinction. Most of the data here come from the pastimes elites listed in their Who’s Who entries. The authors outline three eras in elite culture since the mid-nineteenth century. First, elites distinguished themselves with “aristocratic” hobbies associated with landed estates (Like John Crawfurd, a civil servant born in 1834, who listed: “Hunting, shooting, polo, fencing, boxing, lawn tennis, golf, fishing” (p. 68).) Then they began to distinguish themselves with “highbrow” recreations. (Like David Solomon, a lawyer born in 1930: “Chinese ceramics, music, poetry, art, wine, the championing of unjustly neglected writers” (p. 72).) Third, we got the rise of the “cultural omnivore,” wherein elites increasingly blended highbrow interests with popular culture.  (Like the sociologist Anthony Giddens, born 1938: “Theatre, cinema, playing tennis, supporting Tottenhamn Hotspur” (p. 74).)

This “cultural omnivore” era is ongoing, and Reeves and Friedman spend the second half of the third chapter exploring it further. Using data from the BBC radio show show Desert Island Discs, the authors found that when contemporary elites were asked to tell the British public what music they’d bring to a desert island, they tended to pick popular music – but, crucially, critically acclaimed popular music. With a survey experiment, they found that elites were more likely to emphasize popular tastes over highbrow ones when they were primed to think about rising inequality. It seems that elites strategically display their popular cultural tastes because they “recognize that how they present themselves in public matters” (p. 91). In the context of a supposed meritocracy, as inequality rises, so does a sneakier form of elite distinction.

The book as a whole is organized in three parts of three chapters each, flanked by an introduction and conclusion. The first part focuses on elite distinction, culminating in the culture-focused Chapter 3. The second focuses on elite recruitment, and the third on elite political views and behaviors, including how they vary by race, gender, and family background (long story short: wealth, whiteness, and maleness are significantly associated with more conservative political views). The whole book is a must-read for any sociologist of elites and class. Chapter 4, on the relationship between wealth, kinship, and elites, is my favorite; they draw on probate and kinship data to paint a compelling picture of the complex, compounding links between family money and elite careers.  Education scholars should look to chapters 5 and 6 especially, which cover boarding schools and elite universities in Britain. Political sociologists and political scientists will find the third section on elite political views immensely helpful; reliable data on elite political views are surprisingly few and far between. In general, the writing is clear and engaging enough for courses at any postsecondary level.

The bedrock of the project is the full database of British Who’s Who entrants since 1897. The data cover 155,000 people, representing individuals at the pinnacle of various institutional and career hierarchies in Britain for more than a century. Reeves and Friedman focus especially on people in the latest edition, who are roughly .05% of the national population. The elite of Born to Rule are a “positional elite” – an elite defined by jobs. (Alternative conceptions of the elite are usually based on the individual possession of one kind of resource, like wealth, income, status, or political power.) This conception of elites as individuals at the top of institutions and career hierarchies is, in part, an intellectual inheritance from C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite. But Mills was vague about exactly who the “power elite” were, not least because he was writing during a time when compiling data about a hundred thousand elites was largely impossible.Unlike Mills, Reeves and Friedman have the data to tell us who those positional elites are, how they got there, and even a bit about what they think and do.

The Who’s Who data are wonderful, but they have a lot of limitations. They don’t include information on families, wealth, or political views, for example. Reeves, Friedman, and their research team creatively addressed these limitations by linking the Who’s Who to a huge array of other qualitative and quantitative data. They collected kinship data for a sample of their elites around 1900, comparing the density and persistence of elite kin ties to the country at large.  They used probate records to get information on elites’ wealth and the wealth of their parents – an especially rare kind of data point. They conducted a survey of living elites, using responses to learn about cultural preferences, self-identified ethnoracial categories, and political views. They did survey experiments to dig deeper into elite self-presentation and politics. They conducted semi-structured interviews with over a hundred living elites, and drew on oral histories from an archive for nearly a hundred more. They got nearly 500 judgements from the U.K. Supreme Court. And of course, they even got musical preferences from Desert Island Discs. The Methodological Appendix describes their thoughtful, multimethod approach in detail, and would be a fantastic addition to any graduate-level methods course.

All in all, Born to Rule is an empirical gem. It asks important questions and answers them with rigor and clarity.  By painting such a clear, accessible, meticulous portrait of the British “power elite,” Reeves and Friedman allow us to see beyond the smokescreen of elite meritocratic rhetoric to the cold reality of elite persistence. The distance between what elites say and where they came from is foundational to the myth of meritocracy everywhere. And British elite persistence is of particular global significance. The British Who’s Who, after all, were the main architects and beneficiaries of the largest empire in the history of the world.