["The British Journal of Sociology, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nMore 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.\n"]