The middle class has lately gained much media attention in the United States, as the crisis of neoliberalism has confronted that country with multiple problems. Yet the middle class remains a “fuzzy” subject (p. 19), as the editors of this challenging and important new collection of essays admit. While there exists a tacit consensus in US historiography that the rise of this social formation has somehow characterized modernity at large, US historians do not have a clear conception of what the middle class exactly is in their own country, nor have they even begun to think about the transnational nexus that exists in the class’s dynamic development since the late nineteenth century.
This volume sets out to challenge the traditional version of seeing the middle class — both the idea and the practice — as a product of a European / North Atlantic (i.e., Western) modernity that spread to other...
