Stalking the Path Not Taken

Forty years ago, long before the East Asian tigers roared loudly enough for the world to notice, it was unusual to find scholars who did not focus on middle classes in the study of development in the late-industrializing world. Today middle classes have practically vanished from the literature. In fact, most contemporary scholars of late industrialization focus on practically every social or class force but the middle class, while capitalists, laborers, and/or the state are invoked without pause. While rounding up the usual suspects year after year may not be inherently objectionable as an analytic strategy, it does raise epistemological questions about why middle classes disappeared from the development literature in the first place. Some no doubt would account for this state of affairs by linking the fate of middle classes to the rise and fall of modernization theory, a paradigm built around claims of a morally superior and generative role to be played by the middle classes. When modernization theory held sway in the field of development, middle classes danced on center stage; when modernization theory fell out of favor, replaced initially by dependency or world-system theory and then a variety of state-centered paradigms, middle classes swiftly exited the theoretical limelight.

The problem with emphasizing shifting theoretical paradigms, however, is that it tells little about why a concern with middle classes was not reformulated in terms more compatible with the theories that replaced modernization theory. This need not have been.