Matteo Battistini offers a critical deconstruction of the fetish that social sciences have forged for legitimising American capitalism. The intellectual history of the middle class provides the social history of a political concept that assumes a specific scientific content acquiring an ideological centrality that has no equal in European history. The social sciences have freed the middle class from its historical relationship with work in an attempt to emancipate it from the tension into which it was continually dragged by class conflict. In this way, the social sciences overturn the image of opposing forces of labour and capital into a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy would coexist without tension.

This book was originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020.