The Establishment

This article is about the concept of a dominant group. For other uses, see Establishment.

Eton College in England has educated nineteen UK Prime Ministers.

The Establishment is a dominant group or élite that holds power or authority in a nation or in an organisation. It may comprise a closed social group which selects its own members, or specific entrenched élite structures, either in government or in specific institutions.

The American Sociological Association states that the term is often used by those protesting a small group that dominates a larger organisation. For example, in 1968, a group of academics formed the "Sociology Liberation Movement" (SLM) in order to repudiate the leadership of the American Sociological Association itself, which the SLM referred to as the "Establishment in American sociology".

In fact, one can refer to any relatively small class or group of people that can exercise control as The Establishment. Conversely, in the jargon of sociology, anyone who does not belong to The Establishment may be labelled an "outsider" (as opposed to an "insider").

Anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment ideologies tend to paint establishments as illegitimate.

United Kingdom

The term is most often used in the United Kingdom. In different contexts it may include politicians, civil servants, legal representatives, academics, clergy in the Church of England, financiers, industrialists, governors e.g. Bank of England, BBC etc. The term in this sense is sometimes mistakenly believed to have been coined by the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who in September 1955 in the London magazine The Spectator defined that network of prominent, well-connected people as "the Establishment", explaining:

By the Establishment, I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in the United Kingdom (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.

Following that, the term the Establishment was quickly picked up in newspapers and magazines all over London, making Fairlie famous. However, the term had been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a similar fashion, a century earlier. Nevertheless, the Oxford English Dictionary would cite Fairlie's column as its locus classicus.

However, author and professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University, in his book The Anglo-American Establishment, used the term much more specifically than did Fairlie. In that book (copyright date 1981), (according to an out-of-print edition):

Quigley exposes the secret society's (sic) established in London in 1891, by Cecil Rhodes. Quigley explains how these men worked in union to begin their society to control the world. He explains how all the wars from that time were deliberately created to control the economies of all the nations.

That society was established by Cecil Rhodes in 1891 and, following Rhodes' death in 1902, was carried on by Alfred Milner, which society, Quigley refers to as the Milner Group, but sometimes referred to as the Round Table movement. That group, with significant American input, would, following the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, establish and control the Royal Institute for International Affairs, later to become known as Chatham House.

Much more generally, this use of the word, Establishment, may have been influenced by the British term, established church, for the official Church of England. The term was then found useful in discussing the power elites in many other countries. The English word is now used as a loanword in many other languages.

Australia

The term, establishment is often used in Australia to refer both to the main political parties and also to the powers behind those parties. In the book, Anti-political Establishment Parties: A Comparative Analysis by Amir Abedi (2004), Amir Abedi refers to the Labor Party and the Coalition Parties (the Liberal Party and the National/Country Party) as the establishment parties. It is communally thought that the Coalition parties are more closely aligned to the American and particularly the British political establishment than is the Labor Party. This would seem to be borne out by the fact that many more former members of the Coalition parties have been honoured by the monarchy for services to the Commonwealth.

Canada

The original Canadian Establishment began as a mix between the British and U.S. models, combining political appointments and business acumen. The Family Compact is the first identifiable Canadian Establishment in Anglophone Canada. In francophone Canada, the local leaders of the Catholic Church also played a major role.

The journalist Peter C. Newman defined the modern "Canadian Establishment" in his 1975 book The Canadian Establishment. It catalogued the richest individuals and families living in Canada at the time. All of the specific people he identified were prominent business leaders, especially in the media and in public transit. Newman reports that several of these old families have maintained their importance into the 21st century.

According to Anglo-American journalist Peter Brimelow, Newman's establishment was overshadowed by a new class. His book The Patriot Game "makes a swinging attack on the political, bureaucratic, and academic establishment whose entire well-being rests on the promotion of Canadian nationalism. [He] identifies the federal Liberal party as the selfish and thoughtless inventor of this modern activity of creating a Canadian identity, he argues that it is now a pervasive disease throughout Canada's national political and cultural elite."

Ireland

The term "Official Ireland" is commonly used in the Republic of Ireland to denote the media, cultural and religious establishment.

Hong Kong and Macau

The term is also used in politics of Hong Kong and Macau, where political parties, community groups, chambers of commerce, trade unions and individuals who are cooperative with and loyal to the Communist Party of China and the post-handover Hong Kong Government are labelled (most often self-labelled) "pro-Beijing" or "pro-establishment". The term first appeared in 2004.

Pakistan

The terminology is used in Pakistan to describe the cooperative federation of the powerful military and military led Intelligence agencies . The idea of Establishment is no different from "The Establishment" in the United Kingdom. However establishment in Pakistan is much stronger than any other entity.

The Establishment's sphere mainly consists of the country's high-ranking military officers particularly military Generals belonging to Punjab . Others included are senior civil servants, members of the Judiciary, the most important financiers and industrialists and the media moguls. The Establishment in Pakistan considers the key and elite decision makers in country's public policy, ranging from the use of the intelligence services, national security, foreign and domestic policies. They are believed to be behind the 1999 Pakistani coup d'état.

United States

The United States lacks titled nobility unlike Commonwealth countries. However there are various prominent American families that have held disproportionate wealth and wielded disproportionate political power not too dissimilar to that of titled nobility. Many of these families often have ties to older East Coast cities such as Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Newport, Rhode Island. One such group of interconnected elite families is the Boston Brahmins. Many in the East Coast establishment have ties to Ivy League colleges and to prep schools in New England and the Northeast.

See also

• Anti-establishment
• Cabal
• Collusion
• Cronyism
• Deep State
• Elitism
• Established church
• Establishment war machine
• Iron law of oligarchy
• Liberal elite
• Military-industrial complex
• New World Order
• Political class
• Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland between the 17th and the early 20th centuries
• Power elite
• The Man
• Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory

Further reading

• Burch Jr, Philip H. (1983). "The American establishment: Its historical development and major economic components". Research in political economy. 6: 83–156.
• Campbell, Fergus. The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (2009)
• Dogan, Mattéi, Elite configurations at the apex of power (2003)
• Hennessy, Peter. The great and the good: an inquiry into the British establishment (Policy Studies Institute, 1986)
• Jones, Owen. The Establishment – and how they get away with it (Penguin, 2015)
• Rovere, Richard. The American establishment and other reports, opinions, and speculations (1962)
• Silk, Leonard Solomon and Mark Silk. American Establishment (1980)
• Valentine, C. The British Establishment, 1760-1784: An Eighteenth-Century Biographical Dictionary (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970)