The End of Middle Class Politics?
The response of the middle classes to the financial crisis of 2008 is a central theme in the political systems of most developed, Western countries. This book approaches middle class politics from a historical perspective, looking at its progression since the early 1900s. The middle classes contributed significantly and in various ways to the evolution of mass politics in the West, with middle class intellectuals oriented to social and political reform, such as Leonard Hobhouse, Herbert Croly and Leon Bourgeois, influencing the setup of politics and the building of institutions in the early 20th century, and with lower-middle class disaffection fuelling protest politics in the 1890s and 1900s.
The rise of Fascism in the interwar period owed much to the perception of liquidation permeating the middle classes in the 1920s and the 1930s as a result of post-World War I hardship and the Crash of 1929-31. Conversely, mass affluence during the “trente glorieuses” was the result of the post-World War II growth strategies adopted by conservatives and social democrats alike. The rise of Thatcherism led to the emergence of a more consumerist and market-oriented middle class that enjoyed a high living standard, but was subjected simultaneously to the turbulences of globalization and the fluctuations of the markets.
Political realignments that are currently taking shape after the Crash of 2008 are related to the loss of status and purchasing power of the vast middle class formed during the postwar years. It is also of historical significance to compare various middle class responses in the 2010s to those to the Crash of the 1920s and 1930s. Although authoritarianism and Fascism were the ultimate outcomes of interwar politics, there were, and still are, viable democratic and socially inclusive alternatives.
Sotiris Rizas is Director of Research at the Modern Greek History Research Centre of the Academy of Athens. He received his doctorate from the Department of Political Science and International Studies of the Panteion University of Athens, Greece, in 1992, and was a Visiting Research Associate at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at King’s College, London, UK, and a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow in Research at the Hellenic Studies Program at Princeton University, USA. His publications include The Rise of the Left in Southern Europe. Anglo-American Responses (2016) and articles in Cold War History, Contemporary European History, Mediterranean Quarterly, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.
"Sotiris Rizas’s The End of Middle Class Politics? is a serious and much-needed attempt to shed light on the role and nature of the middle class, identify the underpinnings of its relative economic affluence, and understand the recent and ongoing erosion that has created an environment that no longer “connotes aspirations, but uncertainty and distress since it is identified with a way of life which is not sustainable.”…Rizas has written a clear, thoughtful, well-grounded, and forcefully argued book destined to become a point of reference in a vital but much neglected topic."
Konstantinos S. Skandalis, Mediterranean Quarterly Volume 29, Issue 4, 2018
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