Despite the Asian and Russian fiascos, the general view among the international financial clerisy is that the IMF needs more, not fewer functions.

To be sure, every modern society needs a thoughtful clerisy.

As the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey has noted, while the bourgeoisie provides the clerisy with a living, in times of crisis, the clerisy tends to promote anti-bourgeois fantasies, from nationalism to communism.

Home rule has been highly profitable for the Catalan clerisy, as it has subsidized the diffusion of all sorts of beliefs, such as that Catalonia enjoyed a glorious past before being “conquered” by Spain.

Decades of control over education and culture budgets have produced a formidable clerisy, including legions of political apparatchiks, civil servants, writers, academics, teachers, NGO workers, journalists, and TV producers, among many others.

Whatever the outcome of the current upheaval, the clerisy will not lose.

Likewise, twice in the first half of the twentieth century, in response to an increasingly radical Catalan clerisy, the region’s industrialists ended up supporting authoritarian solutions from the Spanish government.

Clerisy in sentence

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