Making Class: The Middle Class(es) in Social Theory and Social Structure

The common understanding of Karl Marx attributes to him a theory of radical polarization and simplification of the class structure, where the maturation of capitalism eventually results in the mechanical subsumption of all intermediate groupings into a growing and increasingly homogeneous and militant working class. A number of common themes emerge in the Weberian treatments of the middle class, in addition to the ones directly or indirectly derived from Weber. Hindsight makes it quite obvious that theories of the middle classes are both responses to preexisting sociopolitical perceptions of these groups and attempts to influence these perceptions. Bourgeois managers can dissimulate the permanence of their rule by confounding themselves into its "middle mass," and foremen reap the symbolic profits attached to being identified with superior occupations. The large body of writings devoted to the middle classes and the executive that flourished in the 1930s, particularly after 1936, borrowed much of its materials from corporatist ideology, social Catholicism, and Italian fascism.