Search results
enduring’. Maurice regarded literature as the particular property of the middle class and the expression of their values. For him the middle class represents the essence of Englishness (the aristocracy are part of an international elite, and the poor need to give all their attention to ensuring mere survival) so middle-class education should be specifically English, and therefore should centre on English literature. Maurice was well aware of the political dimension of all this. People so educated would feel that they belonged to England, that they had a country
which voted for it? Experience can be found to support several interpretations but it would seem that, in the wake of a landslide victory, governments assume broad authority to interpret their ‘mandate’ as they think fit. The diminishing influence of class on voting As the country which first experienced the Industrial Revolution, Britain, by the early twentieth century, had a well defined and clearly stratified class system, with working-class people (for the most part, those working with their hands) living in older parts of the big cities and the middle classes
historical context of ascending liberal capitalism, by the legal historian Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808–81): society is ‘a concept of the third estate’. (The ‘third estate’ referred then to the estate of the producers, i.e. what we would call the middle and working classes, as opposed to the clerics and aristocracy.) He endorses this observation, explaining that the concept of ‘society’ as used by the middle classes had an egalitarian connotation in opposition to the feudal use of the word in expressions such as ‘fine’ or ‘high society’; he adds that ‘in its very
European and American forms, right-wing populism put the nation, class, race and the role of the state back on the agenda. In doing so it was capturing and building upon shifts that had been evident for some years. In the US, references to a ‘working class’ had been few and far between long before the advent of the neoliberal era. In most discourses, almost everyone was subsumed within the American ‘middle class’. Yet, under the weight of the crisis class made a re-appearance. According to Gallup polling in the US, only 33 per cent called themselves working class in 2000
departments and agencies they instead rest upon a mass of federal government policies that provide incentives (or disincentives) for particular private sector actors. In particular, tax concessions are widely used to subsidise particular activities, many of which offer direct benefits to the middle class (Mettler, 2011 ). For example, there are tax exemptions on health insurance cover and retirement savings as well as the home mortgage interest deduction. Despite their size and scale they are largely invisible to their recipients because such tax credits are far less
’s language. A good example occurs when, upon first seeing the luxurious homes on Malibu beach, she remarks that never before had she seen houses with oceans as their backyard. Cristina’s language functions not merely to present a poor Mexican girl’s view of upper-middle-class California but as part of her attempt to convince the admissions committee at Princeton to admit her and offer her a scholarship. We as viewers of the film join with the admissions committee, judging whether Cristina deserves a scholarship to this prestigious university. And seeing admissions
feminist history to an unacceptable degree. 13 This debate concerning continuity and change re-emerged in the late 1990s: Lerner suggested that we need to analyse both continuity and change in a holistic framework, to ‘refine and complicate our analysis by noticing that different aspects or structures in society change at a different pace and with different effects’. 14 These early approaches tended to assume that all women were essentially the same, and, that, in effect, they shared the concerns of white middle-class women. 15 Women of colour vociferously criticized
increasing irrelevance of race in American life. Building on the thesis first advanced in his earlier work, The Declining Significance of Race , he concluded that the major dilemma for American society at the end of the twentieth century was not race, but class. Thanks to the gains made as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1980s growing numbers of African Americans had managed to achieve middle-class status and incomes. The main division in American life was thus not between blacks and whites, but between haves and have-nots. 10 Wilson
there are many bad people among these people [the poor]; they lack quality and do not know how to behave. They can be loud and dirty, and sometimes they are involved in crime. I think it would be a good idea for middle-class people to live in one area and the lower classes live in another separately. That way the police can monitor them more easily and keep the society more harmonious and civilised.’ Yes, that is a young, wealthy university student calling for the establishment of ghettos so that he and his class can be kept away from the poor. He is, as it
range of socio-economic, rural, urban, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Though frequently portrayed and indeed depicting itself as a homogenous monolith, the PRC is full of contradictory and fascinating complexity. From its multi-ethnic population of hugely varied languages, races and religions to its contrasting landscapes of futuristic mega-cities and rural poverty, it is a land of enormously diverse people and places. The Politics of Everyday China explores some of the critical issues from the perspectives of the newly prosperous middle classes, ever