The Transatlantic Making of the American Middle Class: The Origins of an Essential Category of the American Century

The essay shows how the intellectual origins of the twentieth-century, American middle class were entangled in the transnational networks of political and scientific confrontation developed in Europe between the late nineteenth century and the two World Wars. The literature of the English new liberalism and Labour, the French social sciences and German sociology provided rich methodological and conceptual tools and a broad archive of empirical research that American social sciences successfully used to build a vision of the middle class that was called to overcome the rigid theories and historical interpretations (economicism and historical materialism) of classic liberalism and Marxism. The American social sciences created not only an analytical tool for the understanding of society and politics after Second World War, but also an “ideological category” to normalize social and political life, avoid radicalization in both politics and society, and prevent the breakdown of the institutional framework of liberal democracy. By this way, the middle class became the protagonist of American national history and the cornerstone of the American exceptionalism.