The meaning of social class terms shifts with each nation’s history

Evidence

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. … In Italy, where the feudal aristocracy was destroyed by the mediaeval Communes (physically destroyed in the civil wars, except in Southern Italy and Sicily), since the traditional ‘high’ class is missing, the term ‘middle’ has gone down a rung. ‘Negatively,’ middle class means non-popular, i.e. those not workers or peasants; positively, it means the intellectual strata, the professional strata, the public employees. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2251

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Classifies how ‘middle class’ is defined negatively as non-popular rather than by its own content.
• XREF: The negative definition of a group as ‘not the people’ parallels how nationalist and race-thinking defines the Other by exclusion — a mechanism that carries into Islamophobia readings.

Related

• The meaning of ‘middle class’ varies by national political history (similarity 0.93)
• In Italy ‘middle class’ means the intellectual and professional strata (similarity 0.92)
• The dominant middle-class narrative obscures the existence of a working class in industrial societies. (similarity 0.78)
• Mainstream framing of class as income and status obscures the working class’s existence (similarity 0.78)