We Have Never Been Middle Class

How Social Mobility Misleads Us

Hadas Weiss

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Hardback

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English

Verso Books
03 March 2020

Popular culture; Social mobility; Social classes; Social & cultural anthropology; Political economy

Tidings of a shrinking middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another absorb our attention, but seldom do we question the category itself. We Have Never Been Middle Class proposes that the middle class is an ideology. Tracing this ideology up to the age of financialisation, it exposes the fallacy in the belief that we can all ascend or descend as a result of our aspirational and precautionary investments in property and education. Ethnographic accounts from Germany, Israel, the United States and elsewhere illustrate how this belief orients us, in our private lives as much as in our politics, toward accumulation-enhancing yet self-undermining goals. This meshing of anthropology and critical theory elucidates capitalism by way of its archetypal actors.

By: Hadas Weiss
Imprint: Verso Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 280g
ISBN: 9781788733915
ISBN 10: 1788733916
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 03 March 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Hadas Weiss is an anthropologist based at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study

Reviews for We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us

This is a subtle contribution to the emerging anthropology of social class. In a wide-ranging and thoughtful contribution, Hadas Weiss shows how notions of investment, accumulation and property undergird the appeal of middle class ideology across the globe. - Michael Savage, Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute and author of Social Class in the 21st century