White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Bureaucracy increasingly sets the conditions of intellectual life and controls the major market for its products. The new bureaucracies of state and business, of party and voluntary association, become the major employers of intellectuals and the main customers for their work. So strong has this demand for technical and ideological intelligentsia of all sorts become that it might even be said that a new patronage system of a complicated and sometimes indirect kind has arisen. Not only the New Deal, Hollywood, and the Luce enterprises, but business concerns of the most varied types, as well as that curious set of institutions clustering around Stalinism, have come to play an important role in the cultural and marketing life of the intellectual. The Young & Rubicam mentality is not confined to Young and Rubicam; there are wider groupings which have become adjuncts of the marketeers and which display the managing mentality and style of those who sell systematically.

The ‘opinion-molding profession,' Elliot Cohen has observed, ‘is a tight little community, inhabiting a small territory four blocks wide and ten or so blocks long centering around Radio City, with business suburbs of the same narrow geographical dimensions in Hollywood and Chicago. ' But its reach is wide: at the top, the communications intellectuals (idea men, technicians, administrators) blend with the managerial demiurge in more concrete businesses. Indeed, the styles of work and life of intellectuals and managers, as well as their dominating interests, coincide at many points. In and around these managed structures are intellectuals who, given the modern dominance, must now be considered as hold-outs. And between the two there is much traffic.