Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences: An American Fetish from its Origins to Globalization

231 Pages·2022·2.166 MB·English

by  Matteo Battistini

Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences
Studies in

Critical Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest (Wayne State University)
Editorial Board
Eduardo Bonilla- Silva (Duke University)
Chris Chase- Dunn (University of California– Riverside)
William Carroll (University of Victoria)
Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, Los Angeles/
Columbia University)
Raju Das (York University)
Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University)
Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen)
Alfredo Saad- Filho (King’s College London)
Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo)
Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)
volume 220
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

This book was originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla
globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020, isbn 9788857565842.
Cover illustration: 50s house plan from The Celotex book of home plans: 20 charming homes of moderate cost
by Celotex Corporation, 1952, https:// cli ckam eric ana.com/ top ics/ home- gar den/ see- 110- vint age- 50s- house
- plans- to- build- milli ons- of- mid- centu ryho mes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Battistini, Matteo, author.
Title: Middle class : an intellectual history through social sciences : an
American fetish from its origins to globalization / by Matteo Battistini.
Other titles: Storia di un feticcio. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Studies in critical
social sciences, 1573-4234 ; volume 220 | “Originally published as
Storia di un feticcio. La classe media Americana dalle origini alla
globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020, isbn 9788857565842”–
Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2022022269 (print) | lccn 2022022270 (ebook) |
isbn 9789004514546 (hardback) | isbn 9789004514553 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Middle class–United States–History. | United
States–Economic conditions. | United States–Social conditions.
Classification: lcc HT690. U6 B3813 2022 (print) | lcc HT690. U6 (ebook) |
ddc 305.5/50973–dc23/eng/20220511
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022269
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022270
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-t ypeface.
issn 1573-4 234
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-5 1454-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-5 1455-3 (e- book)
Copyright 2022 by Matteo Battistini. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress.
Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
re- use and/ or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com.
This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
We don’t need your magazines
We don’t need your fashion show
We don’t need your tv
We don’t wanna know

We don’t need we get our fill
It’s esoteric overkill
It’s a shiny new aesthetic
Get us out of vogue
Middle Class, Out of Vogue, 1978
∵

Contents

P reface ix
A cknowledgments xiv
1 T he Middle Class between History and Social Sciences 1
1 T he (Lower) English Middle Class 7
2 B ourgeoisie and Classe Moyenne 18
3 M ittelstand and Neuer Mittelstand 25
4 C rossing the Atlantic 34
2 T he American Middle Class
A Taken- for- Granted History? 38
1 T he Middle Class as a Historiographic Category 41
2 T he Middle Class as a Sociological Problem 54
3 T he Middle Class of Progressivism 69
4 B rain Workers of the World, Unite! 74
3 T he Middle Class as Historical Project 83
1 T he Demiurge of the Middle Class 86
2 T he New Deal for the Middle Class 96
3 T he Crisis of the Middle Class 102
4 T he Ideological Battle for the Middle Class 112
5 T he Middle Class as Political Concept 124
4 T he Rise and Fall of a Fetish 139
1 T he Middle Class of Liberalism 143
2 T he Movement against the Middle Class 149
3 T he New Class of Neoconservatism (and Neoliberalism) 154
4 T he Middle Class as a Figure of the Crisis (in Globalisation) 158
R eferences 169
I ndex 208

Preface

Over the last decade, publications, but also scientific studies and research,
have obsessively announced the decline of the American middle class, its
disappearance, or its end. This is not a new debate. Similar pronouncements
marked the public and political debate in the 1930s, on the occasion of the first
major crisis of capitalism on a world scale, and then again in the 1980s when
the topics were the economic changes following the period of stagnation and
inflation linked to the oil crises as well as President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal
and anti- union policies. The same was true again in the nineties, when the
‘new economy’, supported by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton,
produced increasing results in terms of productivity and profit. Unlike those
historical moments, today the question is faced in light of a field of tension
opened by globalisation which has exploded due to the 2008 financial and
economic collapse. Income inequality, polarisation of the labour market, and
a change in the role of the state are transnational processes which are related
to one other and invoked in order to explain the crisis of the American mid-
dle class.
Today it is a well- established fact that 80% of homeowners have access to
less than half of national annual income, while the richest 1% have more than
doubled their share since the 1980s. Impoverished at home, the American mid-
dle class is not even the richest in the world, especially when one considers
the ascent of a middle class in China, Asia, and Latin America. In this way, if
globalisation was greeted with optimism in the 1990s due to the potential for
growth and prosperity that seemed to come with it, in the new millennium
it represents a darkened horizon. The space for criticism that the no- global
movement had opened during the beginning of the century was closed by the
neoconservatism of President George W. Bush, and today globalisation appears
to be a nightmare in the imagination of the new alternative right which led to
the election of Donald Trump. Today, political and technocratic elites, both
Republicans and Democrats, are accused of being globalists, and globalisation
is presented as a plot against America and its middle class.
The nightmare of globalisation also emerges in the transnational process of
the polarisation of the labour market. Since the 1980s, there has been a change
in the employment structure of the United States, which has occurred accord-
ing to a centrifugal dynamic that has accelerated over the last decade. The
number of creative, highly professional, and highly paid jobs for full- time sci-
entists, engineers, and managers have increased. The number of those working
part- time, hired with specific tasks as well as routine de- skilled tasks, has also
x Preface
grown. On the other hand, the skilled and semi- skilled occupations of the last
century (middle- level managers, administrators, professionals, office clerks,
and skilled workers) are decreasing and have been drastically downsized by
the entrepreneurial strategies implemented to offset the social and labour
mobilisation of the 1960s and 1970s. These strategies include the introduction
of technological innovations (automation and digitalisation), domestic and
international outsourcing in search of a poor and non-u nionised workforce,
and the devaluation of labour in terms of wages, tasks, and prestige through
the use of migrant labour.
President Barack Obama’s middle- class economics have also been ineffec-
tive, since the economic recovery, which also characterised his second term,
did not reverse this trend. The decrease in unemployment did not coincide
with the return of a significant number of middle- skill jobs. In considerable
numbers, new generations especially are finding increasingly low- skill, low-
wage jobs such as services and personal care, which, since they are mainly
provided by migrants, minorities, and women, heighten the sense of impover-
ishment of the male breadwinner of white America. The difficulties encoun-
tered by the first African American president in keeping a nation divided
along lines of class, race and sex unified thus coincided with the sublimation
of the nightmare of globalisation into the reactionary dream of ‘America First’.
This dream envisions America’s future as a return to the mythical nation of
the origins (with its racial and sexual connotations), one that is closed within
the internal and external boundaries identified by white America. The white
backlash against minorities and migrants finds in the word jobs – a plural term
without the polemical tone that had characterised the meaning labour in the
twentieth century – its reason for governing.
To explain the decline of the middle class, liberal commentators and schol-
ars finally call into question the transnational process of changing the role of
the state with the abandonment of the redistributive character of taxation, the
reduction in the policies of social security, and the change in the objectives of
assistance. Even though in the thirty years following the Great Depression of
the 1930s – both in the European language of social rights and in the American
language of entitlement – an expansive vision of the public guarantee of ben-
efits had become established, today the residual supply of assistance is aimed
at the mere reproduction of the working poor. To use the words of President
Clinton, the ‘end of welfare as we have known it’ was followed by ‘welfare to
work’, namely assistance programs which forced people to accept any job
(even if it was precarious and poor) in order to continue receiving benefits.
These programs guide people onto the labour market in an inferior position
that favours the compression of the average wage.