Many of the 18th Century Enlightened philosophers were ministers to their respective kings, and the Enlightenment has been an elite project.
Nowadays, when the elite subscribes to Market Fundamentalism and the political class shows time an again an appalling ignorance of the scientific/technical underpinnings of the way our modern world is organised, it is just conceivable that "the modern world" might unravel through wrong-headed management. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Once the Market Fundamentalists co-opted those words they started to mean their opposites, and lost their potency.
This has actually been a semiotic war. There are plenty of examples of semiotic war from the end of the dark ages onwards, with people writing each other letters and arguing to define reality.
But the Market Fundamentalists have run one of the fastest and most successful semantic campaigns in history, completely debasing and perverting concepts which otherwise showed real promise and squeezing out competing narratives with terrifying effectiveness.
So they were certainly not “ministers to their respective kings”, of which Koselleck writes that they were, on the contrary, to “agree with the king against their own agony”.
I could go on, but you already see my point: whenever the elites act for their own benefit, they still prefer to surround themselves with experts, as a rule. This is not the case when they make decisions for others, and there is a lot more mismanagement there. We like to gripe about all our governments' failures in the Middle East, on health issues, retirement funds, etc., yet do those failures truly affect the elites as much as the rest of society? I don't think so.
The difference is not that great from the 18th century either. Kings' ministers didn't rule *for* the common people then, nor do they now. Social progress did occur, but it was paid for in blood. And today ministers have MBAs and PhDs, which admittedly didn't exist in the 18th century... -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
Louis XIV reactive absolutist reign owes much to la fronde upheaval that would have granted new powers to the parliament and the judiciary. The defeat of la fronde "exiled" progressive thought to the parlors (the salons) and the province. The fables of La Fontaine are political treatise, just as the careful extraordinary works of the Bordeaux landholder Montaigne.
It is fitting that Louis XIV left the state in shambles. His reign simply postponed an inevitable revolution.
I do find that qualifying any major intellectual movement as elite is reductive and somewhat a tautology. There are simple requirements for philosophical speculation in periods of repressive zeitgeist- education, free time, a minimum guarantee of livelihood, a tolerated or clandestine network for the diffusion of works, a knack for dissimulation. It is rare that a serf or peasant could fill the bill. In the rare occasions someone rose from the lower classes, usually through the Church, he or she became "elite."
