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Universities, businessies, and the increase in middle-class wage-earners ( 1960-1975 ). The period 1960 to 1975 is marked by a very large rise in the student population and a no less important increase in the number of «executives». Most contemporary commentators - sociologists among them - have seen in these two phenomena inseparable signs of the same change in social composition. However an analysis of the relations between the educational market and the job market shows that the increase in the number of these executives (often self-taught) is not linked to the increase in student population, as these students, for the most part, joined the public sector (administration, teaching and so on). This has no doubt added to and aggravated the opposition between the fractions of the petty bourgeoisie and middle class, linked as they are to private enterprises, and those fractions linked to the public sector. To a large extent this opposition overlaps that between «right» and «left» in political terms. In fact it is as if the «executive class», whose specificity, at least in so far as their public image is concerned, was defined up to a certain point by opposition to the traditional fractions of the middle classes who possess some form of heritage (minor employers, for example), now entered into a relatively new set of oppositions which were superimposed on the old models of social classification without however abolishing these. Middle-class employees linked to major private bureaucracies (in particular, multinational firms) identify with the image of the «executive class» and by so doing find themselves in opposition to middle-class employees who are linked public administrations concerned with redistribution, production and the circulation of culture. But these antagonistic fractions have perhaps a common interest in their being a continued influence of that very set of factors which made their numerical increase possible in the first place.

The «Christian» Synthesis : over Boundaries towards the «Beyond» The Catholic Centre for French intellectuals (CCIF) has been the most representative institution for the French Catholic intelligentsia from the end of the war right up to the 1970's. As early as 1947 it broke with the method of confrontation based on apologetics and started on a strategy of dialogue with the intellectual field as a whole, by organising debates between intellectuals, believers and unbelievers. Through this dialogue, which aimed to establish a synthesis between religious and profane thought, the CCIF meant to be in the forefront of contemporary debate : it tackled all the intellectual discussions of the day, in every sector of intellectual activity (philosophy, literature, economy, politics, science, etc). The changes in subject matter were in keeping with the changes of emphasis within the intellectual field, from the philosophie and humanistic period of the post-war era to that of technocratie dominance in the 1960's. But amoredetailed comparison between the topics tackled by the CCIF and the tables of contents found in the periodicals Esprit and Les Temps Modernes reveals that the degree of attention granted by the Catholics to the various subjects of discussion differed according to how far positions of faith were at stake in these discussions. Therefore, this «synthesis» remains a Christian one, a form of sui generis synthesis achieved merely by stepping outside and beyond the profane antithesis. The «dialogue» is distinguishable from normal forms of apologetics by its method alone, as its ultimate aims remain the defence of the faith and the promotion of «Christian humanism».

Anti-Semitism in the Universities and Class Rivalry : the Numerus Clausus Law in Hungary between the Wars. During the Liberal period (1867-1918) marked by the political preeminence of the gentry and the economic rise of a foreign middle class predominantly Jewish in origin, institutional anti-Semitism was unknown in Hungary. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the successive revolutions (the middle-classes in 1918, the Communists in 1919), the ensuing White Terror ( 1919-1921 ) deeply upset the balance of forces between the Jewish and Christian components of the ruling classes, bringing to power a new anti-Semitic Right. The University decree, passed in September 1920 and known as the numerus clausus decree, which laid down quota regulations for Faculty entrants according to ethnie and confessional criteria, was a product of that histo-rical moment. This law, the formulation and application of which was fought over by the extremist and moderate factions of the new establishment, limited the relative over-representation of the Jewish middle-class and intelligentsia in higher education, without reducing the drastic saturation within the intellectual professions. It was a class measure aimed at strengthening the position of the Christian middle classes within these markets, but it was never fully applied and its modification in 1928 even seems - on paper at least - to have eliminated its anti-Jewish implications. But its strictly educational effects (the exile of many Jewish students to foreign universities) and its broader social impact (forced conversions, «brain-drain», reversal of assimilationist tendencies of the Jewish middle class) allow one to interpret it as the first act of the Hungarian law-makers and which would lead, 20 years later (the anti-Jewish laws of 1938-1941) to genocide.