>he is talking about subjective understandings of what it means to be
>middle class. furthermore, this discussion does not serve as his
>justification for why he chose to study the people he studied. for
>THAT you have to read the book where he talks about Bellah et al.,
>and then you have to read Bellah et al.
>
>now, if you read the intro, the link to which was posted here, it is
>plainly evident that he is asserting something about what USers
>think about where they sit on the social class ladder. but don't
>forget: his project is to ask about "middle class moraility" not so
>much to make a definitive statement about who really is or isn't
>part of the middle class.
>
>doug is actually wrong is his complaint on two levels. wolfe might
>have fleshed the whole thing out more fully, but the lapel grabbing
>opening of a book isn't exactly where one does that. and, at any
>rate, the point he is making is that USers think they a middle class
>and even when they name themselves as working class they think they
>are middle class. this has been a bone of contention.
>
>here is where an actual familiarity with the debate on subjective
>defs of social class would help. as a test of this issue, the GSS
>constructed a question that asked people to rank themselves via a
>different model. That is, they wanted to test people's
>understandings of what they meant by "working class" and "middle
>class" (the same number identify as middle class as working class
>by the way). this is the question:
First of all, on the first page of the book, Wolfe disappears the concept of the working class entirely - and I have to assume knowingly. That's not "lapel grabbing" - that's devious. Second of all, I don't see how you know that people mean "middle class" when they say "working class." And third, ranking yourself from top to bottom on a numbered scale has a very different set of associations from calling yourself middle or working class. Who, aside from those of a certain sexual prediliction, would place him or herself on the bottom, given the choice?
I can't speak for Yoshie, but I do think the subjective sense of class is important. The fact is, most USers are working class, whether they think of themselves that way or not. "Middle class" is more self-flattering, but structurally inaccurate. The term is highly conservatizing, and a product of a long ideological campaign to de-class American thought. Wolfe's book is part of that project, and doesn't deserve any kind of serious defense. It's no surprise the guy tried to purge the Marxists from the New School econ department - and if that's an ad hominem argument, so be it.
Doug