2014/03/21 by Don Kalb · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Art #Class (philosophy) #Dialectic #Epistemology #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Law #Literature #Middle class #Modernity #Narrative #Phenomenon #Philosophy #Political Economy and Marxism #Political science #Sociology #Urban Planning and Governance
paper · doi:10.1002/9781118378625.ch9
openalex publication_date 2014/03/21 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Governmental reports argue that the world in the twenty-first century is fast becoming urban and middle class, just as Europe and the United States have become urban and middle class in the twentieth century. They also suggest that the new global middle-class world will, like the West, embrace a liberal geoculture. In this chapter it is my intention to sharpen the tools offered by the interdisciplinary confluence of urban anthropology, urban sociology, and Marxian geography around the concept of class and the urban to do what anthropology is by mission expected to do: deconstruct the self-confidence of the liberal narrative of middle-class formation. I will do that by pointing out some empirical and historical complexities – the anthropologist's proverbial stock of trade – and indeed the dialectical contradictions of class and the urban under what is in the end, whether we like it or not, capitalist modernity: a contradictory rather than a linear historical phenomenon.