reviews | Nathan Hollier

RULING PASSIONS

• Mike Donaldson and Scott Poynting: Ruling Class Men: Money, Sex, Power (Peter Lang, ISBN 9783039111374, US$57.95)
• Georgina Murray: Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand (Ashgate, ISBN 9780754647089, £55)

These two studies of the ruling class take very different approaches and achieve quite different levels of success.
     Ruling Class Men is clear, entertaining, compulsively readable and theoretically sophisticated. The book is dedicated to R.W. Connell and the authors are obviously familiar with the existing complex arguments on the subject of the ruling class that Connell, in particular, has developed. They explain:

We are hoping to dissolve the dichotomy by which most sociologists place ‘structure’ ‘outside’ people, and we hope that this may be possible by examining the lives of those in whose beneficence the social system seems, sometimes almost exclusively, to operate. It is, after all, not so hard to see the social system as somehow separate from, over and against, those it dispossesses. And so, perhaps, it may be possible to see how this system operates ‘inside’ those it benefits, by exploring the patterns of practice in which they immerse themselves and through which they create the social logic that underlies their own lives.

     Donaldson and Poynting draw on diaries, biographies and autobiographies – the life-history sociological method – and (in contrast with the work of Michael Gilding, for instance) emphasise the common experiences of ruling-class men at the different stages of their lives, through chapters on i) childhood, ii) servants, iii) schooling, iv) space, bodies and motion (houses, mainly), v) time, work and leisure, and vi) love, sex and marriage. They convincingly portray the psycho-cultural bases of real power and dominance:

The absence of love and intimacy in the childhood of the wealthy creates distance from others … This class is ‘nurtured’ by servants in the nursery, thus making love and emotion appear as a commodity provided by the market … [T]he market releases the rich from the need for basic life skills while intensifying their dependence on it … At [their] exclusive schools boys absorb a masculinity that is competitive, repressive, aggressive and autocratic … This hegemonic style of masculinity is, of course, defined by the absence of women from all but helping and serving functions … Such an upbringing produces men who are “aloof; insecure; insensitive to their own and others’ feelings, desires and mistreatment; capable of surface sociability rather than … meaningful relationships”.

“It is a short step from life in the educational institutions of the wealthy”, they relate, “to the boardroom, where the strategies learned at school and college are consolidated and rigidified into a fully developed product.” “For ruling-class men”, not surprisingly, “romantic, sexual and marital love appear as transactions; as distant, strangely impersonal and instrumental as all their other dealings which pass for close relations.” These men are healthy, pampered, protected, possess “rather fuzzy concepts of what constitutes time, work and leisure” (since no-one ever directs them), and sure of their own innate superiority and importance. Finally: “Their lives, devoid of friendship, trust, loyalty or meaningful love, are … made meaningless by their ceaseless pursuit of profit.” The great measure of Donaldson and Poynting’s achievement is that the reader cannot help but feel sympathy for their subjects.
     There are signs, however, that Georgina Murray’s study has been rushed into print. This is a shame because she writes with passion and Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand contains a considerable body of useful information, such as that gained from the interviews the author conducted with top corporate executives between 1993 and 1997. But it is analytically weak, draws in places on too few sources, sometimes relies on a thin base of evidence, and contains errors of fact and apparently contradictory tables of quantitative data. There are many, many grammatical errors that make identifying the intended meaning difficult, and typographical errors throughout.
     The study contains no reference to either Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (1977) by Connell – listed in a survey by the Australian Sociological Association as the most influential text in Australian sociology – or Class Structure in Australian History (1980, 1992) by Connell and T.H. Irving: the major general history of Australia written from a Marxist perspective. Reading and engaging with these texts would have enabled Murray to develop a more sophisticated and convincing theorisation of the bases and nature of ruling class power and a more nuanced historical narrative.

Nathan Hollier is Overland’s fiction editor, and editor of Ruling Australia: The Power, Privilege and Politics of the New Ruling Class (Australian Scholarly Publishing).

© Nathan Hollier

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.92–93.

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