The world has been getting contradictory messages about its class structure. According to one authoritative account, it has reached a ‘global tipping point’—‘half the world is now middle class or wealthier’. This was based on figures marshalled by Homi Kharas, a former World Bank chief economist now at Brookings. More excitably, the Economist has hailed the ‘relentless rise’ of a ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ and trumpeted the arrival of a middle-class world. Yet serious scholarship also assures us of the opposite: according to Peter Temin, emeritus professor of economics at mit, we should be concerned about ‘the vanishing middle class’.footnote¹ Readers could be forgiven for feeling bewildered. What is going on in economics—and in the economic sociology of the real world? This contribution will examine the varying definitions of ‘middle class’ in play and the contrasting trajectories analysed by development economists, sociologists and financial journalists across the different sectors of the world economy. It will go on to outline a rather different future for the world’s middle classes than either of the extremes suggested here. But first, a few historical and conceptual considerations may be in order, for the concept of the ‘middle class’ has long given rise to debate.

The term ‘middle class’ entered the English language two centuries ago—‘sometime between 1790 and 1830’, according to Eric Hobsbawm—as a rising industrial society overtook the ‘military’ order of monarchy and aristocracy.footnote² The nineteenth century saw intensive discussion over where this new society was headed and the place of the middle class within it. The liberal argument was that the task of government should, and would, fall to the middle class, ‘the most wise and the most virtuous part of the community’, as James Mill put it.footnote³ Had this already been accomplished? For Tocqueville, writing in 1855, the reign of the middle class had been realized not only in the United States but also in France, where the July Revolution of 1830 marked its ‘definitive’ and ‘complete’ triumph.footnote⁴ Would the emergent middle-class society lead on to a new and stable political order? In the later decades of the nineteenth century, this was increasingly questioned. Novel ‘isms’ appeared: mobilizing ideas, first and foremost socialism, which theorized ‘middle-class society’ as capitalism, doomed to be overthrown by the expanded ranks of the industrial working class.

Most strikingly, nineteenth-century discussions featured a conceptual variety notably absent from current treatments of the ‘middle class’. This derived from the flourishing of a number of national languages, each expressing a particular history of class formation and conflict. In Western Europe, there were three major concepts circling around a similar social phenomenon, each from a different angle: the English ‘middle class’ was complemented by the German Bürgertum and French bourgeoisie.footnote⁵ Both originated in medieval urban law, denoting a category of urban residents with special civic and political rights. After the French Revolution, the ‘bourgeoisie’ grew increasingly synonymous with both the English ‘middle class’ and the classe(s) moyenne(s). But it also took on two distinct connotations. One was culturally pejorative: as Flaubert put it, ‘Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue.’footnote⁶ Second, from the 1870s a clear distinction arose between the bourgeoisie and the ‘middle’ or ‘new’ social strata. The bourgeoisie were the big capital owners: bankers and industrialists, the new peak of the social pyramid—that is to say, the upper class.footnote⁷ The middle class—the German Mittelstand; the petite bourgeoisie or couches moyennes in French—was something different. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels paid handsome tribute to the ‘revolutionary’ historical role played by the bourgeoisie, now seen as the embodiment of capital and the sworn enemy of the working class.

Another noteworthy difference: work was a crucial attribute and value of the nineteenth-century middle class, the thing that separated it from the rent-consuming nobility. ‘Work is the burgher’s ornament’, wrote Friedrich Schiller in a famous ballad. ‘Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness’, added Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present.footnote⁸ In today’s discussions, the middle class is overwhelmingly defined in terms of consumption, or rather consumer capacity, measured in dollars (as corrected by international purchasing power parities); occasionally it is specified by some middling location on the national ladder of income distribution—but never by reference to its work. This is all the more remarkable, since contemporary American usage typically deploys the term as a euphemism for the working class.

What are the implications of this mutation of middle-class discourse, from work to consumption? The Economist’s enthusiastic hailing of another ‘two billion bourgeois’ offers a clue.footnote⁹ Like the entry of ‘capitalism’ into the vocabulary of business executives, it is a celebration of victory and power. So long as socialism was seen as a danger, terms like ‘capitalism’ and ‘the bourgeoisie’ were banished to the margins; the acceptable terms were ‘market economy’ and ‘business’. As we shall see, the discursive change connotes an important shift in social hegemony. But first we should examine the conditions that gave rise to the twenty-first century’s new thinking on the middle class.

Contra Mill and Tocqueville, the nineteenth century did not usher in a middle-class world, for the twentieth century was above all defined by the working class. Although social democracy and communism were born in Europe, working-class socialism became a world model, conspicuous in the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions, with their repercussions throughout East and Southeast Asia; in revolutionary Mexico and Fidelista Cuba; in the large progressive movements of Latin America—Peronist Argentina and Vargas’s Brazil, not to mention the pt of more recent times—and in anti-colonial struggles, from Nehru’s Congress via Arab socialism to the anc of South Africa. The labour movement was a major force in the achievement of universal suffrage and the welfare state. It was the main ally—although seldom an exemplary one—of the feminist and anti-imperialist movements. The middle classes were largely in hibernation through these twentieth-century periods of revolution and reform; they gained political salience at times of rising fascism and authoritarianism. But the motor force of working-class reform peaked in the years around 1980 and then rapidly declined.

The end of the working-class century had an economic basis in the accelerating deindustrialization and financialization of the capitalist core; more obliquely, a sociological factor was the social dissolution stemming from the 1968 cultural movement. Yet this did not immediately herald a new middle-class dawn. Western neoliberalism was allergic to any kind of class discourse, and Eastern European anti-Communists preferred to refer to themselves as ‘civil society’, although in power they would claim middle-class credentials.footnote¹⁰ If, as Hobsbawm thought, the idea of the middle class was born in the West, it was reborn in the East and the South.footnote¹¹ In the 1980s the middle class was ‘discovered’ in conservative East Asia, as an outcome of the rapid economic growth of the ‘four little dragons’: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong.footnote¹² The middle classes were emerging as a significant political force in the region, playing central roles in the broad popular movements that put an end to military dictatorships in Seoul and Taipei.