Born to Rule

Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite

Online and in person at NuSpece (Room TBC)

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts? In this talk, based on our new book Born to Rule, we comb through a trove of data in search of an answer, looking at the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today.

At the heart of the study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but we also mined genealogical records, combed through probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want. What we found is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been some progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1% are almost just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago.

What has changed is how elites present themselves. Today’s elite pedal hard to convince us they are perfectly ordinary – in the way they tell their back story, express their cultural taste, or articulate their meritocratic legitimacy. And this is logical; we show that there is a strong symbolic market for ordinariness among the British public.

Why should we care? Because the elites we have affect the politics we get. We show that the family you are born into, and the schools you attend, leave a profound mark on the exercise of power.

Sam Friedman is Professor of Sociology at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is a sociologist of class and inequality, and his research focuses in particular on the cultural dimensions of contemporary class division. He is the author of The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged, Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour, and co-author of Social Class in the 21st Century. His new book (with Professor Aaron Reeves) entitled Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite was named as a ‘2024 Book of the Year’ by The Economist and The Times, and won the 2025 Mary Douglas Book Prize from the American Sociological Association. He is also the co-editor of The British Journal of Sociology.