Sobre a malfalada classe média...
Autor: Flavio H. | Publicado: 2013-07-03T16:13:00+01:00


Sobre a malfalada classe média,&nbsp;vale a pena dar uma lida no Peter Stearns (em 1979!!), "The Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition". E ele chama a atenção para apenas algumas das percepções sociais relacionadas&nbsp;à classe média, na tradição inglesa majoritariamente&nbsp;situadas "mais no alto" da pirâmide social. Na nossa&nbsp;tradição 'francesa' ou mediterrânea, a(s) classe(s) média(s)&nbsp;são, com frequência, percebidas&nbsp;por um&nbsp;viés menos elitista e mais 'pequeno-muito pequeno-burguês', mais popular enfim (ao menos no mundo real, não necessariamente entre os intelectuais de carreira). Os grifos são meus.


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"The concept "middle class" is one of the most enigmatic yet frequent in the social sciences.(1) Historians, in this case no more vague, toss the term about with gay abandon. Think of what the word can connote: The triumphant industrialist, with his satellite professionals as allies, ultimately forming a new ruling class, revolutionary when needed but prone to a quick return to the policies of order and not revolutionary at all when aristocratic or Tory foes had been disposed of. Relatedly, a class imbued with strong cultural values which conveyed a personalized amalgam of Enlightenment-cum-Calvinist ideals and changed the mentality of society, through "social control," well beyond the class itself. But also the Nazis and anti-Semites, the fighters against modernity, and not only in Germany. Property owners but also nonowners who picked up a perhaps "false" but durable class consciousness. Finally, the pervasive bourgeois, a term applicable to both modernizers and anti-modernizers. The cultural philistine, the husband who slept, and may still sleep, at concerts he was dragged to by his wife. The avaricious early capitalist, the gaudy social&nbsp; climber, but also the reader of serialized romantic stories or, more recently, the housewife glued to soap operas. Images could be multiplied, but the point is clear. We're dealing with a peculiar beast and quite possibly with several beasts.

Yet we have made little headway toward anatomical precision. The subject is fraught with ideological overtones, but few ideological stances have produced significant illumination. There are also disciplinary complications. When we are told that social stratification is the prime province of sociology,(2) the social scientific historian might be tempted to run up the white flag and wait for wisdom from on high before attempting his petty data manipulation. Or we could at best yield to the temptation of the conventional, fill-a-gap historian's gambit, of saying that not enough work&nbsp; has been done, that since we have a factual mountain Mohammed must move to it. It is true that we need more research. Really good histories of the middle class are rarer than studies of lower-class groups in such matters as family patterns; and for too many aspects of middle-class value systems we continue to look to rather formal ideologies such as liberalism, with the pious hope that they describe not only class interests but actual class beliefs. We need theory, however, even to orient further research, and we must produce some of it ourselves, for sociology provides ambigous models. A junction of social science disciplines, history among them and not simply as a picker-up of pieces, is obviously called for in a discussion of the middle class. This is an evolved entity; social scientists no more than historians, indeed often less, have captured the evolutionary complexity; and hence disciplinary history has a fundamental definitional role".




(1) Charles Moraze, The Triumph of the Middle Classes (London, 1966); Lenore O'Boyle, "The Middle Class in Western Europe," American Historical Review (1966), 827^45. (2) Peter Blau, ed., Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (New York, 1975), p. 222. 
In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), p.377-378.