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They are so accustomed to, and prepared for, critique that they have made ideas beyond their ken irrelevant and their own relatively unassailable.

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They don’t simply defend power they know how to get it and to outwit their adversaries. Instead, and with all due apologies to Pareto’s theory of elite circulation, those in power today are foxes. In conclusion, I consider the difference between Hungary in the 1970s and the US after 9/11, offering that may these neoconservative intellectuals in US power are not the lions Ivan imagined in the game preserve. I draw especially heavily on a videotaped interview I conducted with Ivan in 1994, which itself provides the best place to start: the conditions enabling the writing, and reception, of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. While I focus on The Intellectuals, I also attend to subsequent assessments of its significance. By focusing intensively on The Intellectuals on the Road To Class Power (hereafter The Intellectuals) and one of its authors we can learn much about knowledge cultures during and after communism, within and beyond Eastern Europe. For these two reasons, I’m especially delighted to contribute to this discussion on the book’s place twenty five years later, but not only for nostalgia’s sake. Within my discipline, Ivan Szelenyi himself has been one of the most, if not the most, important sociologist working on East European social structures and social transformations. The Intellectuals on the Road To Class Power was the single most important book for me during my graduate school days, and was decisive for my dissertation and my first book.