Overclass is a recent and pejorative

Pejorative

Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...

 term for the most powerful group in a social hierarchy

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...

. Users of the term generally imply excessive and unjust privilege

Privilege

A privilege is a special entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis. It can be revoked in certain circumstances. In modern democratic states, a privilege is conditional and granted only after birth...

 and exploitation of the rest of society. Compare the older term, upper class

Upper class

In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...

, which nowadays is sometimes also pejorative, but is not necessarily so, and historically was rarely so.

Perhaps the most commonly agreed-upon "overclass" consists of leaders in international business, finance and the defense industry.

Historian Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell is an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of genres, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America’s class system...

 refers to what he calls a "top out of sight" class in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. These are people who have an even better quality of life than a visible overclass because their vast wealth allows them to affect cultural and political changes without first exposing them to public comment. Conspiracy theories often propose a secret society

Secret society

A secret society is a club or organization whose activities and inner functioning are concealed from non-members. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence. The term usually excludes covert groups, such as intelligence agencies or guerrilla insurgencies, which hide their...

 with supernatural

Supernatural

The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

 overtones as an invisible global overclass.

The word is fairly recent: the Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

 only included it December 2004. But it has been in use since at least 1995. At least some writers compare it to the more familiar underclass

Underclass

The term underclass refers to a segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population under the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences...

:

See also

• Lists of billionaires
• Oligarchy
  Oligarchy
  Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with an elite class distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, commercial, and/or military legitimacy...
  
  
• Power elite
  Power elite
  A power elite or The Grand Elite, in political and sociological theory, is a small group of people who control a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, and access to decision-making of global consequence. The term was coined by C...
  
  
• Ruling class
  Ruling class
  The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
  
  
• Superclass
  Superclass
  Superclass may be:* The global ruling class created by neoliberal globalization * Superclass , a book about global governance by David Rothkopf, and The Superclass List...
  
  
• Upper class
  Upper class
  In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...
  
  
• Underclass
  Underclass
  The term underclass refers to a segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population under the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences...
  
  

External links

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000
• The Origins of the Overclass Steve Kangas, 1999
• Why the Right Is Wrong for America, 1996
• To have and to have not, 1995