The New Class of Neoconservatism and the Delegitimation of American Capitalism

Abstract

The essay presents the American debate on the «new class» as a political category that has been the pivot of the rise of neoconservatism, the public writing of the neocons’ discourse – in particular the one of Daniel P. Moynihan and Irving Kristol – and their strategy aimed at attacking the scientific and political foundations of the liberal order of the American capitalism that between the Sixties and Seventies no longer found in the «middle class» the public word that had tamed the social and political conflicts of the Thirties and fueled the consensus of the second post-war period. In the neoconservative discourse, also in dialogue with neoliberalism, the «new class» identified an «ideological enemy» that had to be disciplined in favor of capitalism, educated in respect of the authority – of society and its moral foundation, of the market and its hierarchies – that the social movements were contesting.