Theoretical issues

Chapters 4 and 9 discuss nineteenth-century regimes essentially composed of only a few thousand families. They could not rule unaided. True, workers provided little organized threat until the end of the century; peasants organized earlier but (as Chapter 19 shows) rarely subversively. It did not matter greatly whether most workers were enthusiasts for king, country, and capital or were disaffected. As they had few stable power organizations, their beliefs were largely irrelevant. Organizational outflanking, however, requires lower-level administrators and loyalists, formerly provided by particularistic segmental networks now somewhat reduced by the universalism of capitalism and modern state. Yet comfort emerged after midcentury from a group of predominantly loyal subalterns, the middle class.

Since then, this class has been mostly loyal to capitalism. Regimes seemingly have worried most about what many writers have believed to be its intermittent tendency to nationalist extremism. I shall look at bourgeois nationalism rather skeptically, finding a much more particularistic social location for what I term an overzealous, superloyal statism. Given such long-lived class loyalty, this chapter often breaks chronological boundaries, generalizing about continuities (where they exist) right up to today. The middle-class nation-state created in the late nineteenth century proved, in crucial respects, to be ours. The middle class has been as important as the working class in shaping Western society.

Defining of the middle class has always been contentious. The rise of “middling groups” immediately presented conceptual problems for nineteenth-century observers.