Full Description
According to Matteo Battistini, The 'middle class' has become a fetish forged by the social sciences to legitimize American capitalism. In this invaluable monograph, Battistini traces the intellectual history of the middle class, and offers a social history of the political concept, whose specific scientific content has acquired an ideological centrality in the U.S. that has no equal in European history. Middle Class argues that 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 the process, the social sciences overtun the image of opposing forces of labour and capital, replacing it with an image of a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy can coexist without tensions.
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
