Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social Sciences: An American Fetish from its Origins to Globalization (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 220) - Hardcover

Battistini, Matteo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004514546 ISBN 13: 9789004514546

Publisher: Brill, 2022

Synopsis

Matteo Battistini offers a critical deconstruction of the fetish that social sciences have forged for legitimising American capitalism. The intellectual history of the middle class provides the social history of a political concept that assumes a specific scientific content acquiring an ideological centrality that has no equal in European history. The social sciences have freed the middle class from its historical relationship with work in an attempt to emancipate it from the tension into which it was continually dragged by class conflict. In this way, the social sciences overturn the image of opposing forces of labour and capital into a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy would coexist without tension.

This book was originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020.

About this title

About the Author

Matteo Battistini, Ph.D. (2008), Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, is Professor of U.S. History at that university. He has published monographs and articles on American political and intellectual history, including Karl Marx and the Global History of the American Civil War (ILWCH, Fall 2021)

Edition details

• Publisher: Brill
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004514546
• ISBN 13: 9789004514546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232