Elites are strange creatures. every society has one--at least one--that members and nonmembers alike are intensely aware of. But only rarely is an elite a formal entity, with stated membership criteria and a list of who belongs. Studying elites is thus an inexact science.

Still, the direction in which the American elite is changing right now seems quite clear. We are somewhere in the course of the greatest capitalist boom in our history. One result is that capitalists will make up our country's next elite. The credential you will have to present to enter that virtual room in which candidates for office are chosen, educational institutions run, foreign alliances forged and social arrangements set will not be family background or educational achievement. It will be having started a successful business and made a lot of money at it.

You can already feel this happening, with the force of a riptide. The self-made American rich are as celebrated, as respected, even as loved as they have ever been in our history and maybe the history of any other country. They smile at us from magazine covers and give us their opinions on television. Their charitable foundations, growing enormously, are taking government's place as the national laboratory for public projects and social innovation. Never mind the Microsoft antitrust suit. The literally murderous personal rage against rich people that was so much a feature of American life at the outset of the 20th century is today almost nowhere to be found.

The American elite 25 years from now won't charge an admission price exactly; still, business success will be its way of assuring itself that an applicant has what it takes to become a member. Those who haven't hit it big as entrepreneurs will somehow seem to have talents that are merely peripheral. The qualities that the elite respects will be a kind of aggressive and even ruthless energy and imagination. Superpromising young people will set themselves on a course to become David Geffen, not Dean Acheson.

When this happens, it will bring us full circle. A century ago, this country had a capitalist elite personified by such business titans as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Then we spent the whole 20th century trying to replace it with other kinds of elites--two of them, to be specific. Now we're headed right back where we started.

During the first half of the century, the American elite was a distinct, quasi-hereditary group whose members were all men, all white and almost all Protestant (quite often Episcopalian). They lived mainly along the Eastern Seaboard. They had gone to Ivy League colleges, and often, before that, to boarding schools in New England. They belonged to the same clubs, lived in the same suburbs and vacationed at the same resorts. They dressed, spoke and looked a certain way. They were of English or Scotch-Irish stock. Exemplified by Henry Stimson, who served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War, they were publicity-averse men who were more powerful than famous. A sociologist who was very much a born-in member of this class, E. Digby Baltzell, bestowed two resonant names on its members: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasps) and the Protestant establishment. In historic terms, they were the gentlemanly replacements, in the American pilot's cabin, for the robber barons who emerged during the capitalist boom after the Civil War.

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