The Privileged Few

Male and white privilege are on the decline, yet elite privilege has gone from strength to strength. The privileges enjoyed by the rich and powerful are not only unfair but cause widespread harm, from the everyday slights and humiliations visited on those lower down the scale to the distortions in the labour market when elites use their networks to secure plum jobs, not least in new domains such as professional sports.

In this book, Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton show that elite privilege is not a mere by-product of wealth but an organising principle for society as a whole. They explore the practices and processes that sustain, legitimise and reproduce elite privilege and show how we are all implicated in the system, both facilitating it and tolerating its harmful effects.

Building on their original fieldwork and a wide range of other sources, the authors paint a vivid picture of the micropolitics of elite privilege, highlighting in particular the vital role played by exclusive private schools. Ranging across topics as diverse as ’glamour suburbs’, philanthropy, Rhodes scholarships and super-yachts, The Privileged Few delves beneath attempts at concealment to expose how the elites keep getting away with it.

Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He was the founder and executive director of The Australia Institute, Australia’s foremost progressive think tank. He has held various visiting academic positions, including at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po and Yale University. His many books include Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change, Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene and Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world (with Mareike Ohlberg). His opinions have been published in Nature, the New York Times, Le Monde, The Times and the Guardian.

Myra Hamilton is an Associate Professor in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School. She is a sociologist and social policy scholar with a focus on inequalities arising from gender, age and social disadvantage. A principal concern of her work is inequalities in the sphere of work. Her research explores how public and workplace policies can build equity and wellbeing over the life course.