The Common Man

My first book, The Common Man: The U.S. Middle Class Between Populism and Professionalism, 1870-1970, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of the Intellectual History of the Modern Age series.

This book rethinks the history of class consciousness in the United States by centering the middle class and by analyzing its various attempts to articulate its economic function and moral purpose within society as a whole.

Most scholarly definitions of class consciousness attempt to explain (and often to evaluate) the social behavior of the working class by identifying and analyzing economic experiences shared among those in similar circumstances with regards to power and property. The middle class has never fit easily into this framework, as those who either self-identify as middle class or who fall into the designated income or educational attainment brackets are too internally diverse in terms of occupation and wealth to share a set of strongly unifying economic experiences. Consequently, several social analysts have either subdivided the middle class into discrete fragments (the “new middle class” or the “professional-managerial class,” the “petite bourgeoisie” or the “lower middle class”) or denied its existence altogether, insisting that the only thing binding people together within this social formation is a set of illusions about equality and opportunity, its denial that class really “matters.”

The Common Man takes as its starting point this stereotypical understanding of the U.S. middle class: its aversion to an understanding of class that its members have often regarded as crude or essentialist, as vulgarly materialist and reductive. The purpose here is not to explore the intellectual tradition of anti-materialism through the work of a few illustrious thinkers, but to see this rejection of class reductionism as pervasive within—in fact, constitutive of—the middle class. What makes the middle class is a common experience of acknowledging that class “matters” but of still denying but that class matters most.

The body of the book explores how this denial took specific ideological forms within the middle class, each time offering a map of society in which the middle class’s mediating role between capital and labor demonstrated the erroneousness of believing that class was the primary fact of social life. Yet despite this unanimous rejection of class’s primacy, members of the middle class had widely different—and often inconsistent—theories about whether there was a different fundamental social force, and if there was, what that factor might be. Race or ethnicity, gender, education or cognitive ability, religion, geography, personality—each had its proponents who insisted that their map of society’s organizing principles was more accurate than one that showed only the terrain of class struggle.

Seeking to understand the social basis of anti-class reductionism within the middle class, The Common Man examines both the “objective” (economic) conditions as well of the middle class as what Jane Addams called the “subjective necessities” of men and women as they theorized and attempted to live out political and cultural roles of mediation they were still very much inventing: the populist, the professional, the intellectual, the race man, the bourgeois radical, the bureaucrat, and the middlebrow entertainer. Addressing not a class—their own or the classes above or below them—but rather “the common man,” these members of the middle class attempted to prove that class divisions were not the final word in social life.

This approach to describing the class consciousness of the middle class has an unexpected consequence: it reveals a much longer and more variegated history of “identity politics” than the standard account, which places its origins within the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their critique of unidimensional or non-intersectional forms of liberatory politics. The Common Man demonstrates that critical analyses of the salience of race and gender have long been central to the middle class’s rejection of class reductionism. This recognition of the vast influence of race and gender on social structures and political and cultural institutions did not, however, always generate a progressive politics; as with all of its other ideological products, the middle class’s identity politics could easily be adapted to diverging or even opposing agendas. What was crucial for our purposes was not the variable political valences of these ideological forms but the consistency of the underlying belief that there was more to social divisions than class conflict and that the middle class’s special intellectual function was to identify and interpret the other factors that in many circumstances intertwined with or took precedence over class. In other words, The Common Man invites the reader to see identity politics as a longstanding, politically mutable preoccupation of the middle class, one pursued by both white and Black members of the middle class, by men and women, all concerned to find a way out of what they saw as a grim and vulgar social vision of irremediable and accelerating class war.