Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Epstein

"The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section"

Joseph Epstein, Writer

About this Quote

A whole class order gets toppled not by a strike or a ballot box, Epstein suggests, but by a quiet editorial redesign. The line is built like a historian's pronouncement, then undercuts itself with a journalist's inside joke: "upper class, capital-S, Society" is already a parody of itself, a world so self-important it requires typographic honors. The wit lands because the "defeat" he names is real in consequence but petty in mechanism. No guillotine, just a section header.

Epstein is tracking a shift in how status is narrated in public. The old Society page existed to certify hierarchy: names, marriages, charities, and clubs as a kind of printed pedigree. Replacing it with "Style" doesn't democratize taste so much as it reroutes the currency of prestige. Birthright becomes branding. The gatekeepers move from hosts and matrons to editors and advertisers; the markers move from lineage to consumable aesthetics. "Style" is portable, purchasable, and endlessly refreshed, which makes it both more inclusive and more exhausting. You can join, but you have to keep up.

The subtext is affectionate and sardonic: Epstein mourns a vanished clarity even as he enjoys its comeuppance. If Society was snobbish, it was at least legible. Style is a newer, slipperier hierarchy that flatters readers with the promise of self-invention while selling them the tools to perform it. The "decisive moment" is really a pivot from inherited privilege to curated identity - and the punchline is that the newspaper, that old civic institution, helped midwife the change.

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Topic	Equality
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About the Author

Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937) is a Writer from USA.

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