This proper Philadelphia story starts with the city's golden age
at the close of the eighteenth century. It is a classic study of an
American business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant
affiliations as well as an analysis of how fabulously wealthy
nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, supported various exclusive institutions that in the
course of the twentieth century produced a national upper-class way
of life. But as that way of life became an end of itself, instead
of an effort to consolidate power and control, the upper-class
outlived its function; this, argues Baltzell, is precisely what
took place in the Philadelphia class system.
Philadelphia Gentlemen emphasizes that class is largely a matter
of family, whereas an elite is largely a matter of individual
achievement. The emphasis in Philadelphia on old classes, in
contrast to the emphasis in New York and Boston on individual
achievement and elite striving, helps to explain the dramatically
different outcomes of ruling class domination in major centers of
the Eastern Establishment. In emphasizing class membership or
family prestige, the dynamics of industrial and urban life passed
by rather than through Philadelphia. As a result in the race for
urban preeminence, Philadelphia lost precious time and eventually
lost the struggle for ruling preeminence as such.
When the book initially appeared, it was hailed by The New York
Times as "a very, very important book." Writing in the pages of the
American Sociological Review, Seymour Martin Lipset noted that
"Philadelphia Gentlemen says important things about class and power
in America, and says them in ways that will interest and fascinate
both sociologists and laymen." And in the American Historical
Review, Baltzell's book was identified simply as "a gold mine of
information." In short, for sociologists, historians, and those
concerned with issues of culture and the economy, this is indeed a
classic of modern social science.
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