Book of the week

Hadas Weiss : We Have Never Been Middle Class

Hadas Weiss We Have Never Been Middle Class című könyv borítója

Photo: MESZL

The book by Márk Áron Éber titled  'A csepp: A félperifériás magyar társadalom osztályszerkezete' was published this year and it is available in Sociology Reading Room; also it was recommended as a new acquisition on the site of  Sociology Collection:
(https://www.facebook.com/fszekszgy/posts/923660861376961)

The  Book of the week by Hadas Weiss deals with similar issues like the book by Márk Áron Éber focuses on;  “We Have Never Been Middle Class” (2020) focuses on the issues in a more global context.  It  summarizes the results of international antropological research work carried out for long years. The basic statement of Weiss' writing  (the author works at Madrid Institute for Advanced Study now, earlier he was the member of the staff at IAS CEU) is that the middle class and related social mobility is an ideology (actually) which motivates people concerned in the age of financialization to make efforts to achieve objectives which are unattainable for them actually.

A short excerption of the following panel conversation:
“I called it [the book - a szerk.] that way to draw attention to what the term middle class implies. When we call ourselves middle class, we have an idea in our minds of how the world works and how we can make it in this world. We may as well just forget the ‘class’ part of the term […], because the idea is that we are not limited by a class at all. We’re just individuals making free choices. ‘Middle class’ implies that so long as we’re not super rich or completely downtrodden, our choices have real consequences for our lives leading us to and fro, in between such extremes. […] So it’s up to us to play our cards right. In my book I expose this idea as an ideology.”

(After the library is reopened, the volumes of the book reviews uploaded on Mondays will be available in Free Access Area, at the table marked "New Foreign Books on Sociology".  Relevant regulations can be seen on library website:  http://fszek.hu/)

Sources and more readings:

Fordulat-issue about the relation of  neoliberalism and  financialization: http://fordulat.net/pdf/4/kotz.pdf

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