Abstract
This paper proposes a new cultural link between the middle class and democracy. In comparative democratization, scholars remain strongly wedded to economic-materialist understandings of the middle class. They define the middle class by income or occupation, but disagree on its role in democratization and weakly explain middle-class formation. In contrast, this paper reconstructs the cultural structures that intertextually link the language of class to the language of democracy. Middle-class discourse is undergirded by a stable set of binary codes through which social actors establish creative links to the discourses of the civil sphere. Embedded in the civil sphere, middle-class discourse takes on three institutional functions—specifying the terms of solidarity and exclusion, intersphere translation, and civil-regulatory power relatively independent of the civil sphere’s own institutions.
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Notes
In a similar way to Dror Wahrman, “the emphasis here is on ‘middle’ rather than ‘class’ […] as a shorthand for representations of society around a “’middle class’” (1995, p. 14). Wahrman objects to teleological presumptions that societies, once modern, shift from the terms “orders” and “sorts” to “class” (1995, pp. 14–15). My focus on middle class comes from how the meaning of “class” is variable—from a narrowly defined group, to heterogeneous groupings, to abstractions. How “middle class” comes to be a representation for society is a feature of its link to the civil sphere.
In The Third Wave, Huntington tempered this argument in an optimist way. While affirming that rapid development created a destabilizing middle class, he noted that it was this very same middle class that eventually led the antidictatorship movements in Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea (Huntington 1991, pp. 67–72). For South Korea and Taiwan he argues that the middle class helped to diminish the conservative influence of Confucian values (Huntington 1991, pp. 71–72). Huntington trades pessimism for optimism but retains his cultural essentialism.
Thanks to one of the reviewers for this insight.
This supports Alexander’s contention that “the knowledge that actors have does not come from their agency as such but from the cultural environment which surrounds it and transforms it into identity” (1998, p. 215).
In situations where middle-class codes would be anti-solidaristic, actors develop a keen sense of when to code switch (e.g., Anderson 2000). In cases where revolutionary discourses compete with civil ones, actors have demonstrated a strong self-awareness of the discursive limits of middle-class language as they grapple with giving up being “middle class” for being “petit bourgeois” (see López 2014; Vrana 2018).
Silva (2013) argues that the political polarization and military coup in Chile in the early 1970s was a result of missing a shared interpretive frame for assessing the political value of the middle class.
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Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the 2017 Social Science History Association meetings in Montreal, QC, Canada. My thanks to Jeffrey Alexander and to the anonymous AJCS reviewers for their encouragement and criticism. Jim Carson, George E. McCarthy, and Ian Sheinheit offered formative advice, and Peter Thomson assisted with the research.
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Villegas, C.M. The middle class as a culture structure: rethinking middle-class formation and democracy through the civil sphere. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 135–173 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0061-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0061-2