The meaning of ‘middle class’ varies by national political history

Evidence

On NM. pp. 148-49, Gramsci writes: “The meaning of the expression ‘middle class’ changes from country to country… . The term came from English social development. It seems that in England the bourgeoisie was never conceived of as an integral part of the people, but always as an entity separate from the latter: it thus came to pass, in English history, that instead of the bourgeoisie leading the people and winning the latter’s support to abolish feudal privileges, the nobility (or a fraction of it) formed the national-popular bloc first against the Crown and later against the industrial bourgeoisie. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2251

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to Gramsci’s national-popular bloc concept that recurs throughout Prison Notebooks and feeds forward into how Islamophobia scholarship reads class versus popular blocs. — connects to: Organized counter-proselytizing institutions built the nationalist middle class — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 106; Post-1918 Britain’s mass Labour party made middle classes fear proletarian power — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 345; By the 1840s the Repeal movement was led by established Irish-American middle classes — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 82
• DEFINE: Establishes ‘middle class’ as an historically-contingent term whose meaning shifts with each country’s trajectory.