Middle Class Growth and Economic Development in Latin America

Abstract

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ANALYSTS have long been preoccupied with those dimensions and forces at work in traditional culture and belief that affect the direction of change and the receptivity of a society to innovation. One element of social organization and social structure commonly associated with modernization and economic development is the availability of a pool of commercial, entrepreneurial, professional, and technical abilities and talents which generally tend to be drawn from those occupational groups often referred to as middle class (1). In point of historical fact, middle class growth was a powerful driving force in the economic and sociopolitical development of Western Europe. Economic power became diffused throughout a new, individualistic, and independent class which successfully broke the political and cultural monopoly of a traditional landowning elite. Recognizing the historical importance of an expanding middle class in social and economic change, contemporary conventional theory assigns it a vital developmental role: It is clear from many country studies that the growth of a robust middle class remains of crucial importance in contemporary low-income nations (2). Despite the usefulness of the theories of Marx, Sombart, Schumpeter, Gerschenkron and others for interpreting middle class growth and understanding the historical changes which accompanied it in the West, it is argued here that the dynamic forces of change and modernization in Latin America may be radically different from those that operated in the presently developed Western countries. In their institutional apparatuses occupational groupings, technologies, and ideologies, the economically underdeveloped countries of Latin America are neither wholly in the position of the Western countries of today nor of those countries two or four centuries past. In some respects the Latin American countries are already developed societies, but not in ways that can provide their populations with the economic opportunity and freedom, the productivity, and hence the standard of life to which they aspire. Theories generalizing from earlier, successful development experiences must be applied with extreme caution in analyzing economic, social, and political change in contemporary low-income countries (3). The possible existence of putatively positive aspects of middle class