These true élites - of information technology or bio-genetics, for instance - must and will be new as knowledge itself grows and takes new forms.So far, so easy. Walden's own novelty is to identify something different: a new, controlling super-élite in Britain of people who have established their position by invoking the will of the majority and justifying it as the only legitimising activity. For these new élites, "populism has become the only acceptable approach to political, social and cultural thinking". These are "oligarchies whose influence depends on their ability to reflect the mood of the moment by catering to society's need for perpetual change". They undermine those "pinnacles of intellectual influence which are seen as pockets of resistance to the prevailing culture".Walden argues that the new élites can be recognised by their slavish advocacy of populism, which he defines as "giving the public what they want, or are deemed to want, and telling them that it is good" The last part of the sentence is crucial. These élitist populists insist that things are brilliant just because they are popular He might add that the corollary is even more noxious. Anything not popular (defined by numbers or money) cannot be good or have any value with which society needs to bother itself, still less to subsidise.That this campaign can happen at all, let alone operate so effectively, comes about in Walden's view because we abuse and misunderstand the very idea of the "mass" Perhaps the British like it that way.

The sterile "élite versus mass" debate can only exist in a polarised world of extremes - a class-based antagonistic world where élite is up and mass is down; an old-fashioned world of ancient political and economic battles.Walden believes that if we could see the mass differently - not as something made up of others but as an entity which includes ourselves, not as the bottom of society but as the middling average - then the fetid swamp in which the current debate exists could be drained.He lays about him with impartial enthusiasm against these cynical collaborators and opportunists. Quoting from Kierkegaard, Gramsci, Heidegger, de Tocqville, Flaubert and many others, he draws up a wide-ranging charge sheet. He attacks egalitarian educationists whose achievement is not only to "manufacture a workforce" but to "manufacture consumers, and the philosophy of education could scarcely be better geared to producing the right kind of consumers from the business point of view". He attacks the mass marketeer for whom, as for the cultural egalitarian, the historic past is another, irrelevant, country Now "feelings are supreme simply because we all have them.

Intellect, being less equally distributed, is seen as divisive."Walden manages to be sharply topical, as when he identifies as worthy of especial ridicule "the arts person oiling his way into the affections of the young... or the BBC executive promising both more accessibility and the maintenance of Reithian standards". The aptness and accuracy of these references suggests that his thesis has a sound analytical base.But this is not a veiled "pro arts-and-culture" book. Anyone who has been involved in the great cultural custard-pie fight will wince at Walden's description of much arts talk as being "high falutin' and ingratiating, patrician and deferential, uptight and élitist". No matter that he castigates Arts Council Chairman Gerry Robinson for adopting a "de haut en bas stance towards the public cloaked in the velvet tones of ultra-democracy"; or ridicules Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary, for being afflicted with a "sentimental fervour peculiar to inverted élites where culture is concerned".We are all named in the charge sheet that follows from our acceptance of, or tacit connivance in, the "logic of ultra-democracy.