Brown is far from the only one who could tell such a tale. “Davos man” is an epithet coined by the conservative scholar Samuel Huntington to describe the very specific type that attends the conference. These are people who, as Huntington wrote, “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in “Superclass” is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward “the global power elite” he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town’s frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he’s greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, “an icon of the global literary scene”! (The literary scene? I don’t think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)

Rothkopf’s credible, if not especially original argument in “Superclass” is that over the past several decades a “global elite” has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly — to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a “class without a country,” as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are “the new leadership class for our era.”

A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of “advisory” firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. “Superclass” isn’t as condemnatory as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization manifesto “No Logo,” let alone the conspiracy theorizing of “The Iron Triangle,” Dan Briody’s exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn’t merely fawn over its subjects, either.

Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified “just over 6,000″ people who match his definition of the superclass — that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine “the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide.” These include heads of state and religious and military leaders — even the occasional pop star, like Bono — but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.

Money alone doesn’t cut the mustard. A fabulously wealthy widow living out the end of a quiet life isn’t in the superclass; you must not only possess power, but also freely exercise it. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, is the paradigm: In addition to running a huge private equity firm, he sits on the boards of a half-dozen cultural foundations and belongs to a laundry list of forums and councils, including the WEF. (He also granted Rothkopf a lunch interview at the Four Seasons Grill Room, as the author takes pains to inform his readers.)

The pope is a member of the superclass, as is Osama bin Laden, who can undoubtedly claim influence over current international affairs, even if he sometimes lives in a cave. The Russian illegal arms dealer Viktor “Merchant of Death” Bout is a member, as are Rupert Murdoch and Bill Clinton, who, while no longer commander in chief of the world’s remaining superpower, nevertheless heads the Clinton Global Intiative, a brand new dynamo in the area of international philanthropy.

Rothkopf’s outlook on these players is roughly Clintonian. He believes in capitalism as an engine for prosperity, but he’s leery of the free-market gospel that dictates that “market reforms” ought to be imposed on faltering economies whatever the social and political costs. “It is true,” he writes, “that governments have been unable to do much of what they should do to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more.” But the “free-market” moniker is misleading, since such a thing doesn’t really exist. All markets are tweaked by governments to some extent, and what the preachers of the free-market religion never acknowledge is that their own favorite case studies are surreptitiously finagled to benefit the already rich.

Taking a dinner party at the home of Chile’s finance minister, Andres Velasco, as an example, Rothkopf describes his uneasy response to the oligarchs around him. He realizes that they embrace the market-oriented philosophy of the “Chicago Boys,” Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago disciples, but only so long as the attendant suffering is limited to Chile’s lower classes. They quietly resist reforms that might nibble away at their iron control of the nation’s industries. “While many of the most powerful people in the country embrace ‘progress,'” Rothkopf observes of Chile, “they use their energy and political capital primarily on behalf of the changes that benefit them most directly. Elites in Chile have implicitly or explicitly resisted the changes that might create more competition, more entrepreneurship, more access to capital for the poor and middle classes.” As a result, though Chile is touted as Latin America’s great economic success story, profound inequities in its society have gone comparatively unchanged.

“Superclass” makes a case that today’s elites are an improvement on those of the past: Instead of inherited aristocracy or sheer military might, power is more likely to go to the smart, ambitious and hardworking. Membership is fluid to an unprecedented extent, with new people muscling their way into the inner circle and slackers dropping out of the bottom all the time. Still, as Rothkopf points out, the ranks of this elite are overwhelmingly older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges. Critics have been complaining for years that Davos is too Eurocentric, one reason why the Boao Forum for Asia was started for Eastern financial honchos in 1998.

Above all, like anybody else — in fact, more than anybody else, given the obsessive, often narcissistic energy required of moguls, politicians and would-be messiahs — these people are self-interested. However gifted, they should not be allowed to operate in a vacuum. The difficulty is that most of them exercise their power transnationally, while laws and regulations are confined within the borders of nation-states (which Rothkopf, in classic Davos-man style, regards as doomed). “We must resist the temptation to reflexively attack elites,” he writes, since human societies need leaders and this is an able bunch, but elites ought to be more accountable to the millions of people whose lives they affect. Otherwise, as history (and the current upsurge in religious extremism) shows, they may provoke a violent and chaotic backlash.