The return of popular anger against elites challenges a number of bold arguments among social scientists, who have expended much effort in conceptually disempowering them. Once easy to comprehend, power has been successively redefined to drain it of menace, to shift its location (from the holders to those on the receiving end) and eventually to make it vanish altogether. Once this diffusion, dilution and dissolution of power is accomplished, it becomes a retrograde step to start pinpointing small, identifiable groups that hold concentrations of it or make coordinated use of it. So elites have remained invisible in many accounts of contemporary economic and social change, even when their restored or never- ended presence is being plainly felt elsewhere.

This analytical disinvention of power disposes of the concept of elites as wielding it in disproportionate amounts, or for sinister purposes. As classically defined by C. Wright Mills, power elites consist of individuals who ‘are in positions to make decisions having major consequences’; and ‘given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the history of mankind’ (1956: 4 and 28). The ‘major consequences’ of their decisions – transforming hundreds or thousands of lives at a time through a policy change, design choice, plant closure or troop deployment – distinguishes the power elite from ordinary technocrats or professionals, reducing its numbers to a nameable headquarter- dwelling handful. The means of power, and the concentration of economic resources that can buy power, have enlarged and centralized further since Mills's assessment, extending the reach of the US power elite across the world while enabling other large countries’ power elites to engage with and challenge it. Their success in wielding such magnified power without correspondingly increased public protest – despite the frequently adverse consequences of their power- play – owes much to their capacity for cloaking the reins.