The rise and fall of highbrow snobbery as a status marker

At any given point in time the markers of high status appear 'natural' and self-evident, ancient and everlasting.1 In the following brief historical reading, this article suggests the temporal frailty of such 'everlasting' status markers. It is not just that fashions change, which they surely do, but beyond such ephemeral changes, the whole intellectual basis on which status markers are established shifts over time, harbingers of changing power relationships in society. This article shows the dynamics of such changes in the United States by tracing the rise and fall of highbrow snobbery as the standard of status honor over the last hundred years, and by setting this system in the context of the systems of status honor which preceded it and the system of cosmopolitan omnivorousness that has followed. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.