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Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There Paperback – March 6, 2001
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Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.
- Print length284 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMarch 6, 2001
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.72 x 8.44 inches
- ISBN-100684853787
- ISBN-13978-0684853789
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Chris Tucker The Dallas Morning News Thanks to Brooks, bobos will join preppies, yuppies, and angry white males in the American lexicon.
Emily Prager The Wall Street Journal Hilarious and enlightening.
Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Perceptive and amusing. [Brooks] has identified the salient characteristics of this new elite, and he describes them with accuracy and wit.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This book started with a series of observations. After four and a half years abroad, I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and was confronted by a series of peculiar juxtapositions. WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99. Suddenly massive corporations like Microsoft and the Gap were on the scene, citing Gandhi and Jack Kerouac in their advertisements. And the status rules seemed to be turned upside down. Hip lawyers were wearing those teeny tiny steel-framed glasses because now it was apparently more prestigious to look like Franz Kafka than Paul Newman.
The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the twentieth century it's been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals -- the hippies and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.
But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn't just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people's attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people, at least among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos.
After a lot of further reporting and reading, it became clear that what I was observing is a cultural consequence of the information age. In this era ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and "the culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos.
These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life. Their moral codes give structure to our personal lives. When I use the word establishment, it sounds sinister and elitist. Let me say first, I'm a member of this class, as, I suspect, are most readers of this book. We're not so bad. All societies have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the older elites, which were based on blood or wealth or military valor. Wherever we educated elites settle, we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying.
This book is a description of the ideology, manners, and morals of this elite. I start with the superficial things and work my way to the more profound. After a chapter tracing the origins of the affluent educated class, I describe its shopping habits, its business culture, its intellectual, social, and spiritual life. Finally, I try to figure out where the Bobo elite is headed. Where will we turn our attention next? Throughout the book I often go back to the world and ideas of the mid-1950s. That's because the fifties were the final decade of the industrial age, and the contrast between the upscale culture of that time and the upscale culture of today is stark and illuminating. Furthermore, I found that many of the books that really helped me understand the current educated class were written between 1955 and 1965, when the explosion in college enrollments, so crucial to many of these trends, was just beginning. Books like The Organization Man, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Affluent Society, The Status Seekers, and The Protestant Establishment were the first expressions of the new educated class ethos, and while the fever and froth of the 1960s have largely burned away, the ideas of these 1950s intellectuals continue to resonate.
Finally, a word about the tone of this book. There aren't a lot of statistics in these pages. There's not much theory. Max Weber has nothing to worry about from me. I just went out and tried to describe how people are living, using a method that might best be described as comic sociology. The idea is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude. Often I make fun of the social manners of my class (I sometimes think I've made a whole career out of self-loathing), but on balance I emerge as a defender of the Bobo culture. In any case, this new establishment is going to be setting the tone for a long time to come, so we might as well understand it and deal with it.
Copyright © 2000 by David Brooks
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; First Paperback Edition (March 6, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 284 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0684853787
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684853789
- Item Weight : 9.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.72 x 8.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #371,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #354 in Sociology of Urban Areas
- #395 in Sociology of Class
- #1,106 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the bestselling author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. He has three children and lives in Maryland.
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Brooks tells us that the cultural warfare of the 'sixties has ended. The stodgy old bourgeoisie, with its clubs, cotillions, and suburban respectability, has been replaced by a new élite deriving its status from brains (or at least formal educational credentials) rather than bloodlines and inherited money. This new élite exhibits superficially "bohemian" manners and mores (if not morals), but not bohemian disdain for money and commerce. These people he describes as "bourgeois bohemians," or BoBos, for short. Their tastes run to slate-tiled shower stalls and trendy coffee shops rather than to gold plumbing fixtures and white-tablecloth lobster palaces à la Delmonico. Brooks's descriptions of "latte towns," filled with shops offering "jars of powdered fo-ti root, Mayan Fungus Soup... hand-painted TV armoires, fat smelly candles, a Provençal spaghetti strainer..." are not quite as entertaining as Beebe chronicling the gilded-age opulence of August Belmont and Evander Berry Wall or the inspired fatuities of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, but are amusing and well-targeted.
Where Brooks falls short is in claiming to discern a Pareto-style succession of élites. The old bourgeoisie has indeed been supplanted - long ago. James Burnham told how it happened in "The Managerial Revolution," published in 1941. The old bourgeoisie was local. It existed in every small town; at its bottom end were mom-and-pop shopkeepers, at its top the mill owner, the banker, maybe the newspaper publisher, and somewhere in between lay the "professional men" (physicians, lawyers, clergymen) who had some sort of academic education. This same structure existed in big cities on a grander scale. The advent of the publicly-traded corporation brought about the end of the family firm at this level. It created "market capitalization," whereby a firm was valued at the trading value of its shares, rather than at the net worth indicated on its balance sheet. This made many owners very rich. It also gave them liquidity, freeing them to diversify holdings and obtain income from sources other than the earnings of family businesses. Increasingly, the management of those businesses became the province of hired managers with the necessary skills, rather than that of owners who no longer needed to know how to manage their businesses. Divorce of ownership from control created a new élite, those who managed and controlled.
This transition was at first masked by graceful absorption of the new élite into the old bourgeois society. As the natural wasting of inheritances by division amongst heirs was accelerated through estate taxation (introduced around the time of World War I), many old families that neglected to cultivate managerial skills declined and disappeared, while new men rose to prominence. The disappearance by the 1960s of the duPont name from the management of E.I. duPont de Nemours & Co., and the appointment of a man named Shapiro to its chief executive post, may not been as widely noted as the noisy street theater of the period, but it was a far more significant indication of the social and economic change that had been taking place steadily for several decades.
The BoBos Brooks describes are only the most recent beneficiaries of this change. Departures from previous fashions in conspicuous consumption are mainly superficial. Altered attitudes towards religion and towards public service are not - there has been real and alarming change here. Brooks is more optimistic than he should be.
Cropping up throughout the book, as well as in a chapter devoted to the subject, is the spiritual void left by abandonment of the old certitudes. Unsatisfied religious instincts often manifest themselves in devotion to quasi-religious causes such as environmentalism, third-world debt relief, animal rights, etc. There is a desire for the comforting forms and rituals of traditional religion, but not its constricting, old-fashioned views on personal conduct, particularly those involving sex.
Brooks briefly notes the public-service ethic of the old American patriciate. Young men of the class of George H.W. Bush volunteered without a second thought for World War II. The debâcle of Vietnam put an end to this. Middle- and upper middle-class youth of the 1960s may have protested that war loudly, but did so even then from the safety of their college deferments. Since that time the uniformed services have been snubbed by the class that provides the country's civilian leadership. If the country were again to face a crisis having the proportions of World War II, how long would the public accept the leadership of a civilian élite unwilling to go into harm's way along with hoi polloi? Previous élites have understood that sacrifice was necessary to the maintainance of élite status. For more than forty years this has been untrue of the managerial élite, and never less so than with the ascendancy of the BoBos. Bill and Hillary Clinton (quintessential BoBos) made no secret of their disdain for the military, which the military repaid in kind. If, as seems to be the case, America must take on the imperial tasks of a world hegemon, this is an important concern. Maybe the remedy is to reinstate the purchase of military commissions. The carriage trade has known for years how to create value by hanging a high price tag on its merchandise. BoBos who go in for "adventure vacations" in malarial rainforests might be ideal customers.
awareness of this and the lack thereof. This was epitomized in the sandwich controversy last year, which briefly
interrupted everybody's arguing about Trump and allowed all sides to dump on Brooks. He brought a young
lady friend to an Italian sandwich deli and realized that she wasn't familiar with some of the names and might
be self-conscious about it and uncomfortable, so he wrote a column and told the whole world in the New York
Times. The internet went nuts! The left couldn't stand him because he's a conservative elitist, and many on the
right these days can't stand him because he's a conservative elitist. This episode shows how the book, written
at the turn of the millenium, has become outdated.
Brooks was allied with Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, but he's actually more like their fathers and mothers,
the original neocons, with not just foreign policy but a heavy emphasis on culture, and he does discuss the
previous generation in this book. Brooks is liberal on gay marriage and similar issues, but also has a desire
for community similar to his fellow Times columnist Ross Douthat, as outlined in the chapter on religion
and community and his recent book on character. Bobos in Paradise is a work of informal sociology that
goes with the insights of Charles Murray, whose Bell Curve is mentioned but whose more important work
may be the later Coming Apart, as well as liberal communitarians like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.
Brooks works in a heck of a lot of his fellow public intellectuals. There's a joke about Francis Fukuyama's
End of History being "wrong" because history didn't end. But in fact Fukuyama's book really is widely
seen to have been wrong, because liberal democracy has not triumphed the way that he observed. Russia,
China, the US and various parts of Europe are going for nationalism and populism. Fukuyama is now writing
on identity politics, which is a function of the crackup of his post Cold War order. Bobos in Paradise also
has turned out to be outdated. Bill Clinton's centrism on the budget and welfare reform, crime, school
uniforms and v chips, and George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism as more than just getting government
off our backs, are signs of the Bobo consensus, combining 60s bohemianism with the 80s bourgeois values.
But it hasn't turned out that way. Obama's liberalism undid Clinton's centrism as the focus of the Democratic
Party, and even before that there was 2004 with Dean, Kucinich and Sharpton, as the Dems went nuts after
Iraq. I was reading this book the day of John McCain's funeral, and both Democratic candidates, Al Gore and
Bill Bradley, and the top two Republicans, George W. Bush and McCain, were identified by Brooks as Bobos.
Who's not accepted by Bobos as their representative? The first name was Donald Trump, and then for different
reasons Pat Robertson. Bobos can spend money, but it has to be for a serious and useful purpose, and Trump was
lavish for exactly the opposite reasons.
Being from Plattsburgh area, I found the description of Burlington as the new Berkeley to be absolutely hilarious,
with all the freaks on the Church Street marketplace and the serious Bobos eating it up. But the most important
epitome of the Burlington mentality is Bernie Sanders, who in important ways has gone nationwide and just like
Trump, reflects the breakup of the Bobo consensus.
Top reviews from other countries
Even though the author identifies himself as a member of the group (and quite some of the readers are likely to be, too), he does not really pull punches, meaning he is a pretty acerbic commentator of the behaviours and identifiers of the group. If you can stomach laughing at yourself, the book delivers well - the examples are certainly something many readers will recognise (to an extent) from their own lives or from the environment in which they live. Everything from relation to work, to shopping, cultural and rcreational pursuits, spirituality, education, sexuality... will be covered, often with humorous anecdotes.
The author also does a fair job of describing the gradual process of the group's emergence, the drivers behind it, the set of guiding values, etc. Where I feel the book works less well is in perspective. Brooks is heavily US focused and while many elements described will also work for the Western European society, the applicability starts dropping, when you move elsewhere on the globe.
His focus on the one class is of course acceptable but his implications that this 'class' totally supplemented many of its predecessors, or that it is indeed the dominant or only game in town amongst the well off educated population are neither supported nor particularly easy to buy without further justification on the author's part. Quite why the bobo is likely to outlast all other forms of humankind, and remain the only surviving social group (as claimed in the introduction) is also a mystery not solved in the book itself.
And while he does bow to Veblen's Conspicuous Consumption (Penguin Great Ideas) as a volume of historical merit, he neither gives the impression of having studied the ideas in it thoroughly, nor an explanation why he believes the 'conspicuous consumption' ideals are dead (ostentation changes shape and form through time).
So overall a very amusing and to an extent enlightening book, which makes good light reading, is certainly well written but which will need some complements (Veblen and Fussell spring immediately to mind) for a fuller picture.
He also notes how the modern Bobo business executive actually works longer hours than some others and the cynic might conclude that Bobo culture is a way to make hard-driving American capitalism more acceptable to the masses. But if people are genuinely enthused by their jobs and prefer to drink latte instead of martinis, who is to say this is wrong?
Most Bobos are us. And as Mark Steyn once remarked, some of the American passengers on board Flight 93 who overcame their hijackers were "Bobos" on the sort of definition that Brooks gives us. Truth is, that we may eat organic vegetatables and read Jane Jacobs, but that does not mean that this generation is any less capable of bravery than the so-called Greatest Generation.
Definitely recommended reading.













