The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%. Theories such as "Paradox of Interest" use decile groups and wealth distribution data to determine the size and wealth share of the middle class.
Terminology differs in the United States, where the term middle class describes people who in other countries would be described as working class. There has been significant global middle-class growth over time. In February 2009, The Economist asserted that over half of the world's population belonged to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a substantial amount of discretionary income and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter.
History and evolution of the term
The term "middle class" is first attested in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France. Another phrase used in early modern Europe was "the middling sort".E.N. Williams, "Our Merchants Are Princes": The English Middle Classes In The Eighteenth Century" History Today (Aug 1962) Vol. 12 Issue 8, pp. 548–557.
The term "middle class" has had several and sometimes contradictory meanings. Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry in late-feudalist society. While the nobility owned much of the countryside, and the peasantry worked it, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city. In France, the middle classes helped drive the French Revolution.Georges Lefebvre, La Révolution Française, 1951 1957 This "middle class" eventually overthrew the ruling monarchists of feudal society, thus becoming the new ruling class or bourgeoisie in the new capitalist-dominated societies.
The modern usage of the term "middle-class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T. H. C. Stevenson identified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class. The middle class includes: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is control of significant human capital while still being under the dominion of the elite upper class, who control much of the financial and legal capital in the world.
Within capitalism, "middle-class" initially referred to the bourgeoisie; later, with the further differentiation of classes as capitalist societies developed, the term came to be synonymous with the term petite bourgeoisie. The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economies result in the periodic (and more or less temporary) impoverishment and proletarianization of much of the petite bourgeois world, resulting in their moving back and forth between working-class and petite-bourgeois status. The typical modern definitions of "middle class" tend to ignore the fact that the classical petite-bourgeoisie is and has always been the owner of a small-to medium-sized business whose income is derived almost exclusively from the employment of workers; "middle class" came to refer to the combination of the labour aristocracy, professionals, and salaried, white-collar workers. A broad middle class can act as a counterweight against oligarchy.
The size of the middle class depends on how it is defined, whether by education, wealth, environment of upbringing, social network, manners or values, etc. These are all related, but are far from deterministically dependent. The following factors are often ascribed in the literature on this topic to a "middle class:"
Achievement of tertiary education. Holding professional qualifications, including academics, lawyers, chartered engineers, politicians, and doctors, regardless of leisure or wealth. Belief in bourgeois values, such as high rates of house ownership, delayed gratification, and jobs that are perceived to be secure. Lifestyle. In the United Kingdom, social status has historically been linked less directly to wealth than in the United States,Williams, "Our Merchants Are Princes": The English Middle Classes In The Eighteenth Century" History Today (Aug 1962), Vol. 12 Issue 8, pp. 548–557. and has also been judged by such characteristics as accent (Received Pronunciation and U and non-U English), manners, type of school attended (state or private school), occupation, and the class of a person's family, circle of friends and acquaintances.
In the United States, by the end of the twentieth century, more people identified themselves as middle-class (with insignificant numbers identifying themselves as upper-class). The Labour Party in the UK, which grew out of the organised labour movement and originally drew almost all of its support from the working-class, reinvented itself under Tony Blair in the 1990s as "New Labour", a party competing with the Conservative Party for the votes of the middle-class as well as those of the Labour Party's traditional group of voters – the working-class. Around 40% of British people consider themselves to be middle class, and this number has remained relatively stable over the last few decades. Alternative link for same study: Oxford University News: Most People in Britain Today Regard Themselves as Working Class
According to the OECD, the middle class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income.
Political Theory The middle class is often described in political science as a stabilizing buffer that prevents either extremes (the high and low classes) from dominating and thus preventing authoritarianism, Aristotle being one of the first to propose this idea.
Some modern political scientists interpret the middle class as a decentralizing force on wealth and power and thus play a crucial role in maintaining democracy by diffusing power away from central authorities. Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth described a power dynamic where the high and low classes ally against the middle. In his model, the "high" (central authorities) inevitably always seek absolute authority but are prevented by the "middle" and so try to dismantle them by allying with the lower classes, the middle class being the only obstacle to complete centralization.
Barrington Moore Jr. further supported this idea in his book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy arguing that the rise of both fascism and communism were caused by the lack of a strong independent bourgeois middle class.
Marxism
Marxism defines social classes according to their relationship with the means of production. The main basis of social class division of Marxism: the possession of means of production, the role and position it plays in social labor organization (production process), the distribution of wealth and resources and the amount. Marxist writers have used the term middle class in various ways.Communist League Britain, Marxism and Class: Some definitions. undated. http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/Marxclass.htm at §The 'Middle Class' In the first sense, it is used for the bourgeoisie (the urban merchant and professional class) that arose between the aristocracy and the proletariat in the waning years of feudalism in the Marxist model. Vladimir Lenin stated that the "peasantry ... in Russia constitute eight- or nine-tenths of the petty bourgeoisie". However, in modern developed countries, Marxist writers define the petite bourgeoisie as primarily comprising (as the name implies) owners of small to medium-sized businesses, who derive their income from the exploitation of wage-laborers (and who are in turn exploited by the "big" bourgeoisie i.e. bankers, owners of large corporate trusts, etc.) as well as the highly educated professional class of doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, university professors, salaried middle-management of capitalist enterprises of all sizes, etc. – as the "middle class" which stands between the ruling capitalist "owners of the means of production" and the working class (whose income is derived solely from hourly wages).
Louis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey), a pioneer 20th-century American Marxist theoretician, defined the middle class as "the class of independent small enterprisers, owners of productive property from which a livelihood is derived".Lewis Corey, "American Class Relations", Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1 no. 2 (January–March 1937), p. 141. From Fraina's perspective, this social category included "propertied farmers" but not propertyless tenant farmers. Middle class also included salaried managerial and supervisory employees but not "the masses of propertyless, dependent salaried employees. Fraina speculated that the entire category of salaried employees might be adequately described as a "new middle class" in economic terms, although this remained a social grouping in which "most of whose members are a new proletariat".
Professional–managerial class
In 1977, Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich defined a new class in the United States as "salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor ... [is] ... the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations;" the Ehrenreichs named this group the "professional–managerial class".Stewart Clegg, Paul Boreham, Geoff Dow; This group of middle-class professionals is distinguished from other social classes by their training and education (typically business qualifications and university degrees),Philip Green, with example occupations including academics and teachers, social workers, engineers, accountants, managers, nurses, and middle-level administrators. The Ehrenreichs developed their definition from studies by André Gorz, Serge Mallet, and others, of a "new working class", which, despite education and a perception of themselves as middle class, were part of the working class because they did not own the means of production, and were wage earners paid to produce a piece of capital. The professional–managerial class seek higher rank status and salaries and tend to have incomes above the average for their country.Gail Paradise Kelly, Sheila Slaughter;
Recent global growth Modern definitions of the term "middle class" are often politically motivated and vary according to the exigencies of political purpose which they were conceived to serve in the first place as well as due to the multiplicity of more- or less-scientific methods used to measure and compare wealth between modern advanced industrial states, where poverty is relatively low and the distribution of wealth more egalitarian in a relative sense, and in developing countries, where poverty and a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth crush the vast majority of the population. Many of these methods of comparison have been harshly criticised; for example, economist Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, describes one of the most commonly used comparative measures of wealth across the globe, the Gini coefficient, as being an example of "synthetic indices ... which mix very different things, such as inequality with respect to labor and capital, so that it is impossible to distinguish clearly among the multiple dimensions of inequality and the various mechanisms at work."