Twenty‐First Century Butlers and the New Spirit of Service

More than 50 years ago, Lewis Coser argued that the "servant" had become obsolete, claiming that such a "premodern" occupation could not function within modernity without religious legitimations. However, with parts of the contemporary service sector exhibiting the very characteristics that Coser viewed as "premodern"-especially within services to wealthy elites-there is reason to review Coser's thesis. In this paper, I do just that through the case study of the 21st century butler, drawing from an ethnography where I trained and worked as a butler myself, interviewed private service butlers (N = 26), and analysed servant instruction literature and memoirs (N = 33) spanning the last two centuries. After demonstrating how contemporary butler practices exhibit a high degree of servant-like characteristics, I turn to the question of how butlers consent to these conditions. On top of economic factors such as necessity and security, the paper highlights: (1) how butlers coming from the luxury hospitality sector engage in a kind of service illusio, where the desire to deliver "high levels of service" renders their occupation craft-like and vocational; and (2) how butlers derive subjective symbolic rewards from close proximity to elites by vicariously consuming distinct lifestyles and finding excitement within the peripheries of power. I suggest that these constitute features of a "new spirit of service", one that expresses servanthood and social class through the more modern mediums of "professionalism" and "lifestyle", securing servant-like labour within worlds of work generated by wealth inequalities.