Harry Potter and the bourgeois-bohemian dream

Looking back at the dreams and resentments of an ascendant class

My latest article in The Critic looks at Harry Potter as a description of a historical social phenomenon. First section below:

“Recently I found myself trying to describe the appeal of the Harry Potter books to a friend who’d never read them, and I came to realise that, at over a quarter of a century since The Philosopher’s Stone was published, the series can now be used to illuminate the dreams, obsessions and resentments of the class of people who took over the reins of first culture and then politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Britain and the Western world more widely. The fact of the rise of this class to prominence is a commonplace and there are many terms in circulation for them that capture various overlapping elements: liberal elite, new elite, graduate class, meritocrats, champagne socialists, or even for the specific British generation that J. K. Rowling belongs to, Britpoppers.

This class rose with the postwar economic expansion and the meritocracy that accompanied it, and combined 1960s counter-cultural values with conventional worldly success. They saw themselves as defined against the fallen old world and being oppositional and anti establishment was core to their self image. For a descriptive term therefore I like American journalist David Brooks’s coinage of Bobo (bourgeois bohemian) from his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. As Scott Alexander said in his partial review of Bobos, the neologism “was cute but never caught on”, but nonetheless I will use it going forward. Harry Potter is often associated with the millennial generation who were its first and largest target market, but while the millennials grew up in the world the bobos created and largely imbibed their philosophy (which is one reason why they liked Harry Potter so much), they were not, of course, its originators.

For the ascendant bobo class of the late 20th century, there were two broad groups of villains in society who blocked them from achieving their social goals. The first and numerically larger was the socially conservative middle and working classes who continued to vote for the Tories and support the monarchy, crassly seek wealth, and venture bigoted opinions at family occasions. The Dursleys are a caricature of this class: Brexiteers avant la lettre, represented by the Daily Mail, Jeremy Clarkson, consumerism, Surrey, materialism and acquisitiveness, anti-intellectualism, concern for respectability and what the neighbours think above all, and the dullness of a career spent doing something as prosaic as manufacturing drills. Like Harry, many bobos grew up in this environment themselves and had to endure its frustrations as children and teenagers. As for Rowling herself, born in 1965, she grew up in small towns in Gloucestershire in the 70s and 80s with a non university educated engineer father, with whom she had a difficult relationship and later became estranged from.”

Read the rest there.