White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The market, though it is undoubtedly a buyer's market, has been paying off well. The demand of the bureaucracies has been not only for intellectual personnel to run the new technical, editorial, and communication machinery, but for the creation and diffusion of new symbolic fortifications for the new and largely private powers these bureaucracies represent. In our time, every interest, hatred, or passion is likely to be intellectually organized, no matter how low the level of that organization may be. There is a great ‘increase of conscious formulation,' Lionel Trilling remarks, and an ‘increase of a certain kind of consciousness by formulation. ' Around each interest a system is made up, a system founded on Science. A research cartel must be engaged or, if none yet exists, created, in which careful researchers must turn out elaborate studies and accurately timed releases, buttressing the interest, competing with other hatreds, turning pieties into theologies, passions into ideologies. In all these attempts to secure attention and credulity, in all this justifying and denying, intellectuals are required. The great demand for new justifications has been facilitated by four interrelated and cumulative processes:

I. Traditional sanctifications have in the course of modern times been broken up; no longer are underlying meanings tacitly accepted. With the new, diverse, and enlarged means of communication, traditional symbols have been uprooted and exposed to competition. In this breakup, the intellectual has played a major role; and as urban society has demanded new heroes and meanings, it has been the intellectual who has found them and spread them to mass publics.