We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us

We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us
ISBN-10
1788733940
ISBN-13
9781788733946
Category
Social Science
Pages
176
Language
English
Published
2019-10-29
Publisher
Verso Books
Author
Hadas Weiss

Description

Taking apart the ideology of the "middle class" Tidings of a shrinking middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another absorb our attention, but seldom do we question the category itself. We Have Never Been Middle Class proposes that the middle class is an ideology. Tracing this ideology up to the age of financialization, it exposes the fallacy in the belief that we can all ascend or descend as a result of our aspirational and precautionary investments in property and education. Ethnographic accounts from Germany, Israel, the USA and elsewhere illustrate how this belief orients us, in our private lives as much as in our politics, toward accumulation-enhancing yet self-undermining goals. This original meshing of anthropology and critical theory elucidates capitalism by way of its archetypal actors.

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