Middle class

The middle class is a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy. The very definition of the term 'middle class' is highly political and vigorously contested by various schools of political and economic philosophy. Modern social theorists - and especially economists - have defined and re-defined the term 'middle class' in order to serve their particular political ends. The definitions of the term 'middle class' therefore are the result of the more- or less-scientific methods used when delineating the parameters of what is and isn't 'middle class'. The middle class is a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy. The very definition of the term 'middle class' is highly political and vigorously contested by various schools of political and economic philosophy. Modern social theorists - and especially economists - have defined and re-defined the term 'middle class' in order to serve their particular political ends. The definitions of the term 'middle class' therefore are the result of the more- or less-scientific methods used when delineating the parameters of what is and isn't 'middle class'. In Weberian socioeconomic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly among cultures. One of the narrowest definitions limits it to those in the middle fifth of the nation's income ladder. A wider characterization includes everyone but the poorest 20% and the wealthiest 20%. In modern American vernacular usage, the term 'middle class' is most often used as a self-description by those persons whom academics and Marxists would otherwise identify as the working class which are below both the upper class and the true middle class, but above those in poverty. This leads to considerable ambiguity over the meaning of the term 'middle class' in American usage. Sociologists such as Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl see this American self-described 'middle class' (i.e. working class) as the most populous class in the United States. 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'. The term 'middle class' has had several, sometimes contradictory, meanings. Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe in late-feudalist society. While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, a new bourgeoisie (literally 'town-dwellers') arose around mercantile functions in the city. In France, the middle classes helped drive the French Revolution. 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 that falling between the upper-class and the working-class. Included as belonging to the middle-class are: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is possession of significant human capital. Within capitalism, 'middle-class' initially referred to the bourgeoisie; later, with the further differentiation of classes in the course of development of capitalist societies, the term came to be synonymous with the term petite bourgeoisie. The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economies result in the periodical and more or less temporary impoverisation and proletarianisation of much of the petit bourgeois world resulting in their moving back and forth between working-class and petit-bourgeois status. The typical modern definitions of 'middle class' tend to ignore the fact that the classical petit-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, the professionals, and the salaried white collar workers. 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 modern usage to a 'middle class': In the United States by the end of the twentieth century, more people identified themselves as middle-class than as lower or 'working' 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. By 2011 almost three-quarters of British people were found to identify themselves as middle-class.