The Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition

Abstract

The concept middle is one of the most enigmatic yet frequent in the sciences. Historians, in this case no more vague, toss the term about with gay abandon. Think of what the word can connote: The triumphant industrialist, with his satellite professionals as allies, ultimately forming a new ruling class, revolutionary when needed but prone to a quick return to the policies of order and not revolutionary at all when aristocratic or Tory foes had been disposed of. Relatedly, a class imbued with strong cultural values which conveyed a personalized amalgam of Enlightenment-cumCalvinist ideals and changed the mentality of society, through social control, well beyond the class itself. But also the Nazis and anti-Semites, the fighters against modernity, and not only in Germany. Property owners but also nonowners who picked up a perhaps false but durable class consciousness. Finally, the pervasive bourgeois, a term applicable to both modernizers and anti-modernizers. The cultural philistine, the husband who slept, and may still sleep, at concerts he was dragged to by his wife. The avaricious early capitalist, the gaudy climber, but also the reader of serialized romantic stories or, more recently, the housewife glued to soap operas. Images could be multiplied, but the point is clear. We're dealing with a peculiar beast and quite possibly with several beasts. Yet we have made little headway toward anatomical precision. The subject is fraught with ideological overtones, but few ideological stances have produced significant illumination. There are also disciplinary complications. When we are told that stratification is the prime province of sociology,2 the scientific historian might be tempted to run up the white flag and wait for wisdom from on high before attempting his petty data manipulation. Or we could at best yield to the temptation of the conventional, fill-a-gap historian's gambit, of saying that not enough work