Full Description
Matteo Battistini offers a critical deconstruction of the fetish that social sciences have forged for legitimising American capitalism. The intellectual history of the middle class provides the social history of a political concept that assumes a specific scientific content acquiring an ideological centrality that has no equal in European history. The social sciences have freed the middle class from its historical relationship with work in an attempt to emancipate it from the tension into which it was continually dragged by class conflict. In this way, the social sciences overturn the image of opposing forces of labour and capital into a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy would coexist without tension.
This book was originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Middle Class between History and Social Sciences
1 The (Lower) English Middle Class
2 Bourgeoise and Classe Moyenne
3 Mittelstand and Neuer Mittelstand
4 Crossing the Atlantic
2 The American Middle Class A Taken-for-Granted History?
1 The Middle Class as a Historiographic Category
2 The Middle Class as a Sociological Problem
3 The Middle Class of Progressivism
4 Brain Workers of the World, Unite!
3 The Middle Class as Historical Project
1 The Demiurge of the Middle Class
2 The New Deal for the Middle Class
3 The Crisis of the Middle Class
4 The Ideological Battle for the Middle Class
5 The Middle Class as Political Concept
4 The Rise and Fall of a Fetish
1 The Middle Class of Liberalism
2 The Movement against the Middle Class
3 The New Class of Neoconservatism (and Neoliberalism)
4 The Middle Class as a Figure of the Crisis (in Globalisation)
References
Index
