From George Will's August 23 Washington Post column, headlined "Obama's State Capitalism":

Even more than the New Deal and the Great Society, Obama's agenda expresses the mentality of a class that was nascent in the 1930s but burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. The spirit of that class is described in Saul Bellow's 1975 novel “Humboldt's Gift.” In it Bellow wrote that the modern age began when a particular class of people decided, excitedly, that life had “lost the ability to arrange itself”:

“It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. . . . This arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power.” So, shrewd and nutty people such as Rep. Barney Frank are brimful of excitement about arranging American life.