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What We Talk about when We Talk about the Middle Class
What do we talk about when we talk about the middle class? The critical half of the term is not “class” but “middle.” It evokes a spectrum of gradated positions with people moving to and fro between lower and upper reaches. The middleness of middle class suggests space: we move socially and economically relative to people occupying higher or lower positions, inching closer to some and then to others. It also suggests movement in time: awareness that within the span of our own lifetimes we can ascend or descend. Consecutive generations of our families may do the same, impelling, continuing or altering our greater upward or downward trajectories. Our perpetual movement bespeaks restlessness. The middle class is sometimes spoken about as an aspirational group, drawn by prosperity within reach, and sometimes as an insecure one, haunted by a fear of falling. It is, as social critic Barbara Ehrenreich1 put it, evanescent: requiring ever-renewed effort to assert and maintain one’s social position.
In contrast to “middle,” which is amplified in the way we talk about the middle class, “class” is toned down. In fact, class is muted to such an extent that, as some theorists have noted, saying “middle class” is almost like saying “no class at all.”2 They point out how middle classness summons neither a deeply held sense of identity (just compare it to things like race, religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation), nor empathic allegiance to members of the same group, if a group is even acknowledged. One reason is that, unlike with slaves and masters, serfs and lords, or even, tellingly, workers and capitalists, there is no class to which the middle class stands in clear opposition. Instead, it replaces cohesive and demarcated groups with an image of multitudes of disconnected individuals. Each comes fully equipped with a personal history, drive and destiny, as if no fixed definition could possibly capture who they are, what they do and how they are likely to fare.
What is more, in recent decades we have come to perceive society as being comprised, quite simply, of middle classes and others. In this perception, “middle class” stands for normality: individuals who stand on their own two feet and progress or decline in a conventional way, which is to say systematically, independently and (barring exceptional occurrences) incrementally, without significant upheaval. This is seen as reflecting the standard nature of their investment and its rewards, or of their inertia and its penalties. Directly above the middle class, per public imagination, lounge elites who are spared the effort of ascension and the danger of decline; while immediately below idle about the welfare-dependent underclasses and other marginal populations if our frame of reference is advanced economies, or destitute masses if we are looking further afield, all of whom appear, in contrast, to be shackled to their misery.
The idea of middle class as a class-neutral norm of individual self-determination is a denial of what “class” stands for. It negates the notion that indirect and impersonal forces might delimit our position in society or preordain the opportunities we will have and the quality of life we will enjoy. Class is stronger in indicating an external determination of our lives than categories like race, gender and religion. This is because social and economic opportunities are inherent in the concept of class (as opposed to, say, a member of a race or gender group being assigned a certain fate through the recognizable influence of place- and time-specific racism or sexism). To reject class or (what amounts to the same thing) to assert middle classness is to spurn the notion that our chances of success in life might be shaped by anything other than our own desires, capacities and, above all, efforts. And the middle class does this in a big way.
The potential to become middle class suggests that social mobility—both rising and falling—is our own doing. Finding the referent for “middle class” is tricky precisely because its boundaries are so fluid. Indeed, they have to be fluid for mobility to work. “Middle class” stands for open-ended meritocracy, holding forth a promise of entry to anyone who invests and the threat of decline over anyone who doesn’t. Delaying gratification, sacrificing some consumption in order to put something aside, taking on the risk and commitment of indebted ownership and investing in education and training, in a home, in a savings plan, in a pension, are all middle-class strategies of rising and of taking precautions against falling. Middle classness implies that anyone can potentially ascend through effort, initiative and sacrifice, just as anyone can descend if they are fickle, lazy or wanting in aspiration. It pronounces us the masters of our destinies and kings of our fortunes. This applies just as forcibly to our image in the eyes of our peers: if we made it, we must have applied ourselves, and if we failed, we probably haven’t and have no one to blame but ourselves.3
If this is what “middle class” means, what purpose does it serve? We might begin to answer this question by looking at its biggest fans, be they politicians or policy experts, corporations or marketing firms, development agencies or financial institutions: all those who intone moralizing proclamations about the middle class being harbingers of democracy, progress and consumption-fueled economic growth. They have markedly different and sometimes conflicting sensibilities and agendas when they seek the expansion of the middle class or speak up for middle-class interests and vulnerabilities. Common to all of them, however, is a de facto if rarely acknowledged attachment to capitalism, if only because they depend on its workings for the accomplishment of their respective goals.
The most erudite apologia for so-called bourgeois virtues has been penned, tome after wordy tome, by economist Deirdre McCloskey, who finds in the middle class everything from honesty, through richer social, emotional and even spiritual lives, to motley identity choices.4 Anyone who has ever visited an affluent community whose residents boast that they never lock their doors knows how annoying it is to have privilege name itself morality. But when someone as smart as McCloskey deems a manifold of virtues inextricable from the enormous privilege that is required to exercise them, she speaks in good capitalist faith. These gifts and sensibilities, she believes, are available to all of us as the spoils of economic growth: the more people out there who possess bourgeois virtues, the more whose lives will similarly be enriched as presumed billions already have been.
Literary critic Franco Moretti5 reassigns as “middle class” what McCloskey calls “bourgeoisie,” reminding us that by the nineteenth century it has come to replace the earlier, more rigid category because of its greater capacity to connote social mobility. With this in mind, we understand McCloskey to be saying that middle classes are capitalism’s protagonists, actors whose virtues reflect those of capitalism itself, and whose proliferation marks the spread of its riches. Moretti goes on to observe how well the honesty that McCloskey attributes to members of the middle class aligns with the machinations of the capitalist market. An economic system’s ideal typical actors need only play by the rules in order to enjoy its rewards: nothing is gained by trying to game so beneficent a system.
Proceeding from this insight, an obvious entry point to deciphering the category “middle class” lies in examining how capitalism works and the outcomes it promotes. Let me, then, briefly outline some aspects of capitalism that prefigure the purpose of the middle class within it.6 McCloskey refuses to commit to a definition of capitalism beyond the trite notion of self-interested action that, let loose in healthy competition, encourages the gumption and enterprise that makes markets grow, with bountiful spillover effects—the famous rising tide lifting all boats. A more instructive starting point is one of capitalism’s hallmarks: its foundation on a production process that, save few exceptions, is not centrally planned or coordinated. Unlike production in alternative or earlier social and economic systems, production in capitalism is not typically designed to generate the goods and services that would satisfy what people determine through democratic procedure or despotic decree to be needed by some or all of them. Instead, everyone is supposed to be free to produce what they will, and competition between producers decides the success or failure of each enterprise.
Proponents
