[In the following review, Thomas compares the American version of snobbery presented in Snobbery with the British and Australian versions.]

Snobbery in Britain, particularly in southern England, is well documented. There are books about it (of which Nancy Mitford's Noblesse Oblige is probably the classic), it is the driving force of most of the television situation comedy from Steptoe and Son through Fawlty Towers to Keeping Up Appearances, and magazines like the Spectator continue to both observe and exemplify it. It is less documented, or even acknowledged, elsewhere in the English-speaking world, although as Barry Humphries has spent a lifetime gleefully demonstrating to us, and Joseph Epstein has now set down for his fellow Americans to see, it may be just as common and important.

Together with its conjoined twin, fashion, snobbery affects in some way—and in some cases infests—most aspects of contemporary life, and interesting new snobberies are emerging constantly. A few years ago, professionals who wanted to appear dynamic began to speak of themselves as working “out of an office” rather than simply in one, which was presumably where they did most of their work. Then, as computers allowed many professionals to work at home, they described themselves as working “from home”, not at home, where their computers were, presumably to avoid being confused with women who take in ironing.

Epstein's usual book is a collection of personal essays on various topics. This one is a collection on various aspects of one topic [Snobbery]. It is a subject he has touched on before, but the repetitions do not detract from it.

Defining snobbery is difficult, and Epstein spends several pages looking at various aspects of it before deciding, “The essence of snobbery, I should say, is arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people.” Others might argue that many snobs can be satisfied only by appearing superior—status in the eyes of the world, not merely in their own mind, is what they seek. Some people also derive satisfaction more from simply making others feel inferior.

His field of survey is also rather narrow. His main theme is the decline of the old forms of rank—where the American “WASP aristocracy” was the example for all snobs—and the examination of what has replaced it. So his subjects are mostly what one might call the upper middle class. He is not unaware of the existence of snobbery among most, or all, other sections of society; it is just that in a book of moderate length he had to draw the line somewhere, and he apologises in advance “if your favourite snobbery is missing” from his survey.

Epstein looks at snobbery from all three sides: as victim, perpetrator and observer. Why, he wonders, is he snobbish? He doesn't think he got it from his parents, who as far as he can tell were not snobbish at all. Is it from being Jewish, which has inevitably made him a victim of snobbery, and hence keenly aware of it? Probably not, because, as he observes, there are people of all backgrounds, Jewish included, who are completely free of snobbery.

“An intelligent person of a certain age ought to be able to fight free of all forms of snobbery, if only to keep his or her mind clear for larger thoughts,” he writes, but it is not easy to suppress at least a certain pride when you see so many examples of foolishness around constantly. The observer of snobbery can hardly avoid feeling a little superior to the self-deluded poseurs he observes.

Among the changes Epstein observes is in the status of various forms of work. Doctors and lawyers have gradually lost status to people in those jobs that yield the greatest financial return for the least apparent effort. The arts and sports are particularly prestigious. Although they may actually require immense effort, it doesn't show in public; they seem merely to draw on one's spontaneous talent.

In recent decades the self-absorbed people attracted to the arts by this apparent ease have actually managed to change the nature of the arts themselves so that they really don't require much effort. Andy Warhol, whom Epstein discusses, was the first master of this. His only genuine talent was his extraordinary ability to convince large numbers of people that whatever he did was chic. Mick Jagger has successfully done a Warhol for forty years. In popular music in that period talent has become all but irrelevant; image and fashion have supplanted substance, and as a consequence snobbery, to which the young are especially susceptible, has supplanted judgment. Snobbery had earlier mined jazz; serious music, on the other hand, appears to be emerging from its most snobbish, sterile decades.

The higher forms of artistic endeavour are also riddled with snobbery. Epstein's exemplar here is the career of Susan Sontag, whose success he regards as depending entirely upon the snobbery of Europhile American intellectuals. Pauline Kael, the famous New Yorker movie critic, is another of the New York intellectual set whose writings are explicable simply as the bleatings of a snob.

The role of snobbery in the visual arts would require several volumes on its own. Once again though, snobbery largely explains the course of the visual arts over at least the past forty years (and art forgery would not exist without art snobbery). When it comes to political decisions about spending on the arts, it takes a courageous politician to defy the arts establishment. Politicians are terrified by the prospect of the massed contempt of a pack of vociferous snobs; and so we get the sorts of public architecture and sculpture we get. The derisive public outcry that led to the banishment of the hideous yellow sculpture Vault from Melbourne's City Square in the 1980s is notable for being a rare victory over the arts snobs. Another was the extensive celebration of the music of J. S. Bach that took up so much of the Melbourne Festival in 2000; but that was only a temporary victory, and the subsequent appointment of Robyn Archer as festival director ensured it would not recur.

Snobbery goes a long way toward explaining political correctness. Epstein has a telling anecdote about a political disagreement he had with a left-leaning physician. After a time their argument had reached a stalemate, and the physician said, “Oh, you may be fight, but all I know is that I care deeply about people.” Tom Lehrer observed something similar in his song “The Folk Song Army”, about the self-righteousness of the early-1960s folk singers:

We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war and injustice,
Un like the rest of you squares.

The folk-song movement may have introduced acceptable explicit snobbery into popular culture. Pete Seeger's “Little Boxes” must be one of the snobbiest songs ever written, and Bob Dylan, beginning with “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, made a career out of expressing self-righteous contempt for ordinary people.

Still, the defenders of substance and quality in the arts have themselves sometimes been to blame for the reaction against them. T. S. Eliot's famous declaration that poetry in our age had to be difficult, and his refusal to allow his poetry “to appear in paperback books intended for the mass market” went a long way towards undoing the positive influence of his writing.

There has been considerable response to Epstein's book in America, including a greater attention to examples of snobbery. For example, some research has shown that wine snobs are just that—not always experts at all. When fifty-seven of them were given the same wine twice, a week apart, and told once that it was a fine wine and on the other occasion that it was an ordinary one, they gave twice as many favourable comments to the “good” one and twice as many unfavourable comments to the “ordinary” one. In other research some experienced wine drinkers in a blind test were unable to tell a red from a white. A new book, High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher, examines the large part snobbery has played in the surge in sales of four-wheel-drives.

David Brooks has recently argued that the trend towards enhancing self-esteem might make snobbery redundant—we will soon all be happily drifting about on our own little clouds of self-esteem, unconcerned about comparing ourselves with others. On the other hand, for those postmodernists who deny (or pretend to) that we can discern reality, only image matters, in which case snobbery must be the main criterion for any sort of judgment.

An Australian book about snobbery would be quite different from Epstein's. For one thing, there was never a WASP aristocracy here with the sort of influence or wealth of America's. Second, snobbery here is probably less class-based; car snobbery, for example, has long been available to everyone in Australia. Third, Australians have a fairly limited idea of snobbery, mostly derived, I suspect, from English television. Who could write such a book? Alex Buzo appears to be one of the few Australians who understands the subject at all, as his Dictionary of the Almost Obvious shows; I nominate him, and suggest Bunging On Side as his title.