Abstract

Beginning with an analysis of a recent book by Matteo Battistini on the American middle class, the author analizes the concept of the middle class in the XX century, conceiving of this category in historiographic and sociological terms as the equivalent of a fetish, that is, a symbolic object of mediation and legitimization of capitalism. In the author’s view, the middle class concept is an “after-thoughtµ for the historian and a problem for sociology: in the XXI century, the middle class concept represents a crisis that is not only economic and social, but also cultural and political. The crisis of the middle class invests the very historical conditions of possibility of democracy, which appears unable to govern globalization