Overclass
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Overclass is a recent and pejorative term for the most powerful group in a social hierarchy. Users of the term generally imply excessive and unjust privilege and exploitation of the rest of society. Compare the older term, upper class, which nowadays is sometimes also pejorative, but is not necessarily so, and historically was rarely so.
Perhaps the most commonly agreed-upon "overclass" consists of the legal leaders of a culture, i.e., those who exercise power in public view. The heads of government and finance ministers of the G8, and influential leaders of the United Nations, may be examples of a World overclass.
Historian Paul Fussell refers to what he calls a "top out of sight" class in the United States. These are people who have an even better quality of life than a visible overclass because their vast wealth allows them to effect cultural and political changes without first exposing them to public comment. Conspiracy theories often propose a secret society with supernatural overtones as an invisible World overclass.
The word is fairly recent: the Oxford English Dictionary only included it December 2004.[1] But it has been in use since at least 1996. At least some writers compare it to the more familiar underclass:
- We now have a quite new phenomenon in the history of the republic: two radically isolated sectors of the population, the underclass and the overclass. Both are in an adversarial posture toward the great majority of Americans, the overclass by virtue of ambition and unbounded self-esteem, the underclass by virtue of social incompetence and anomie. Between the two there is a fearful symmetry on many scores, but their service to each other is far from equal.[2]
