Chapter 3 focuses on the application of the reasonable person in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter begins by considering why the reasonable person is frequently placed on means of public transport. It argues that the reasonable person’s presence on the omnibus means that others can see it and that the reasonable person itself sees others. The chapter then considers whether the standard of the reasonable person was meant to be an empirical standard or a standard controlled by the courts. It does so by asking whether the idea was that one could actually encounter the reasonable person on the Clapham omnibus. Contrasting the concept of the reasonable person with the concept of the average human person proposed by the Belgian sociologist and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, the chapter establishes that the reasonable person was meant to be a court-controlled standard. Finally, the chapter shows how the standard has historically been construed exclusively in male terms. It addresses the discriminatory potential of the standard and acknowledges that the reasonable person concept has often been applied in a manner that excludes anyone who does not share the characteristics of the male, white, middle-aged judge who applies the standard.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Donald Trump was not the first president to favor smaller government, but they understood and respected the need for government even as they favored an adjustment in the mix. Instead of a conversation about the mix, Trump made politics about the distrust and animosity of Americans toward other Americans. His efforts to retain the presidency even though he lost the election based on the “big lie” poisoned trust in elections that continues, and his plan to stop the election of Joe Biden discarded democracy altogether. These tactics made it more difficult to have a national conversation about a change in the mix of government and markets that could renew economic opportunity for those left behind by economic developments and previous decisions of government by both political parties. The government helped to unbuild the middle class when it borrowed money to fight the Vietnam War, ignored how globalization harmed many Americans even as it benefited others, and cut taxes in ways that mostly benefited the wealthy and robbed the government of needed resources.

This chapter assesses the interplay among social class and the growing centralization of African American literature in the marketplace. Since the 1980s the production of black literature has been increasingly shaped by the economic and aesthetic priorities of commercial bookselling. Contemporary African American writers have expressed their awareness of the ways that the commodification of black literary expression has both imposed limits and created new possibilities for literary art. These authors have been particularly attentive to new patterns of consumption and reception that emphasize class distinctions among consumers and genres of writing. These changes have prompted writers to rethink traditional assumptions about the social and aesthetic obligations of black middle-class writers in forging alliances with the working class. The chapter considers these shifting social relations with reference to literary works by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead.

The high economic growth created jobs to reduce inequality as well as poverty. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the effect was more than offset by other factors, like the widening wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. There was also a large amount of transfer to the rich through the real estate market, while fiscal policy transferred little to the poor. Industrial relations were repressive. In the 1980s, inequality slowed to widen as the offsetting factors weakened and the transfer through the real estate market decreased, but industrial relations became more repressive. South Korea sustained high economic growth through the democratization process because, while staving off a possible disaster, democratization was limited in scope. Democratization failed to narrow inequality as it interacted with other forces, but it led to reforms to enhance the transparency of the economy. Independent unions emerged with democratization, but it aggravated the non-performing loans problem.

The cycle of Atlantic revolutions reached the intercontinental Portuguese monarchy according to a specific chronology. Between the first French invasion (1807) and the ultimate triumph of liberalism (1834), the fate of the Portuguese kingdom hung in the balance as it was tied in large part either to the interaction between Brazil and Portugal or to more global connections. The independence of the American territory, after sketches failed attempts of a constitutional integration between 1820 and 1822, precipitated a sharp internal political polarization between absolutists and liberals in the European kingdom. For the latter, the collapse of the empire forcibly had as an alternative a radical break with the civil order of the Ancien Régime. After successive political contexts and a civil war, this model, with a marked anti-aristocratic stamp, would ultimately triumph.

This chapter examines the middle-class milieu and setting of much of Salman Rushdie’s work. Such an exploration of the upwardly mobile, increasingly affluent, and globally connected Indian bourgeoisie highlights their elaborate lifestyle and aspirations. Another common thread binding the characters in Rushdie’s novels is the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This is the city that his middle-class bourgeois characters share with the criminal classes and the entertainment industry. In Mumbai the lines between the legitimate and the criminal are very often blurred, and many of Rushdie’s protagonists find themselves teetering over the abyss of the underworld. Those of Rushdie’s characters that have moved into global spaces of power and affluence are still umbilically attached to their natal city, where they were born middle-class, but have achieved wealth through crime or the world of entertainment, and have either voluntarily left the island city or have had to flee it. Instead of an omnibus overview, this chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Rushdie’s upwardly mobile middle class as they move from Bombay to London and from there to the new world in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and The Golden House.

This chapter examines the relationship between Mexican American literature and the strand of Chicano activism focused on the needs of the working class. By offering literary case studies, including Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlan (1976), Arellano identifies how literary activism has diverged from these needs. Although literature could aid the plight of workers by enabling a group to recognize its solidarity, Arellano argues, the identity that Chicano literature consolidates is ultimately distinct from the working class as such. So even as Chicano literary activism tends to be presented as the cultural arm of a labor movement, such activism has instead operated as the psychic support for a growing Mexican American middle class. While it may seem as if the interests of this growing class are unified with the needs of Mexican American workers, a shared Chicano culture has not been able to address the economic problems that each class faces. It remains necessary to identify continually the difference between literary activism benefiting the middle class and a labor movement benefiting workers.

The chapter outlines the colorful history of power and resistance in pre-British Hong Kong. Many communities involved in this part of Hong Kong’s history continued to play a part in the colonial and post-colonial struggles. The chapter also discusses how the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and financial center fomented different social groups that were mobilized in the struggle for Hong Kong’s future by competing political forces at the height of the Cold War. Most significant is the rise of a new middle class in tandem with the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy into a finance and service-centered one in the 1970s and the 1980s. This new middle class, combined with the plurality of grassroots social movements, charted a course for the locally rooted democratic movement that continued to grow after the sovereignty handover, constituting the backbone of the resistance in its quest of greater autonomy of Hong Kong under Beijing’s rule.

Chapter Seven discusses the evolution of the opposition movements seeking Hong Kong’s democracy and autonomy before and after the handover. The mainstream democratic opposition in Hong Kong grew out of the anti-colonial and Chinese nationalist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Their moderate, non-confrontational approach to gradual democratic reform made some gains in the first 15 years of China’s rule. Simultaneously, the increasing aggressiveness of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom, coupled with the rising social polarization caused by the influx of Chinese capital, fueled the growth of more radical, confrontational social and opposition movements.

This chapter first explains how the Chinese Communist Party is organized and controls the political system. Unlike the political parties in mature democracies, the Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist party that resembles a secret society, characterized by monopolistic communist ideology, strict hierarchy, exclusive membership, and two unique party organs: the Propaganda Department, and the United Front Work Department. In such a political system, the party eclipses the entire society, including the government, creating a unique party-state that imposes absolute rule over China. The chapter further shows that, leveraging its total control, the party-state creates a low human rights environment in China that enables the party-state to achieve its objectives with few costs and little resistance. In the past four decades, China’s economy grew rapidly, creating a large middle class. However, due to its total dependence on the party, the newly emerged middle class is in no position to push for democracy and the rule of law.

In 1976, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong died, providing an opportunity for China to change his revolutionary course that led the country to ruin. In the late 1970s, the CCP changed course and began to open China to investment and trade. The democratic countries welcomed the change and engaged with China, hoping that economic development would lead to democratization. Forty years later, the Chinese economy has become the largest in the world, but democracy and the rule of law are still missing. This chapter provides an overview of the book. The author argues that, wielding its absolute and total control, the CCP has made the entire country into a giant corporation. China, Inc. has the agility of a corporation and the resources of a country, making it extremely competitive globally. However, China, Inc. also has its built-in contradiction: its need to close China from the democracies’ influence, and its reliance on the world’s openness to thrive. Based on the China, Inc. perspective, the author makes policy and strategic suggestions for the democracies and multinational corporations dealing with China.

The chapter summarizes the book’s main argument. It explains post-communist Russia’s social stratification and relatedly its democratic fortunes with reference to the social structure that predated communism. It locates the genesis of the bourgeoisie-cum-middle class, conventionally regarded as broadly supportive of democratic institutions, in the estate system of imperial Russia, which distinguished between the nobility, the clergy, the urban estates of merchants and the meshchane, and the peasantry. The estate – its juridical, material, and symbolic aspects – simultaneously facilitated the gelling of a highly educated, institutionally incorporated autonomous bourgeoisie and professional stratum and engendered inequalities that persisted throughout the communist period and plagued subsequent democratic consolidation. It demonstrates that the pre-communist social structure has shaped Russia’s stark subnational developmental and democratic disparities as well as national democratic outcomes. The chapter goes on to interrogate theories of class, modernization, and critical junctures, as well as paradigmatic earlier assumptions about the rupture associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. It then proposes causal mechanisms accounting for social resilience and persistence after the Revolution. It also puts forward an alternative periodization of communism in Russia as 1928–86. Sources used – archival sources, memoirs, private papers, interviews, historical census, as well as electoral, demographic, occupational, educational and other data for the imperial, communist, and post-communist periods – are also discussed.

This chapter engages with theories of democratic origin and persistence, late developing states (following Gerschenkron), and workforce dependencies in post-communist settings to suggest how understanding the genesis of the middle class/bourgeoisie in imperial Russia, and distinguishing it from a middle class that is state-fabricated rapidly as part of communist late development catch-up, could help refine theories of the links between the bourgeoisie/middle class and democracy. Based on analysis of author-gathered regional and district data on estate structure and voting for the imperial First, Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas and post-communist parliament, and ascertaining that the “old” middle class exhibits greater democratic proclivities than the “new,” I corroborate the theory of a two-pronged middle class. I first explain how unpacking the genesis, resilience, and political orientations of the multilayered stratum of the educated estates nuances ongoing debates about the interaction between distinct sets of legacies associated with pre-communist and communist regimes. Next, I present analysis that systematically extrapolates the insights from the dissection of the reproduction of the social structure to explain variations in subnational democratic quality in Russia. I also perform a placebo test demonstrating how the deportation of entire communities, the Volga Germans, wipes out the effect of a social legacy.

To understand the conflicts in many of Roth’s novels, it is important to situate his narratives within the context of class conflict, in particular. Class identity – particularly, Jewish middle-class identity – is an influential factor in the development of Roth’s protagonists. As Ruth Wisse points out in her article “Philip Roth Then and Now,” “Roth’s fictional interpretation of American Jews as a regnant bourgeoisie disturbed as much as it amused,” as it addressed an anxiety about materialism and upper class assimilation, particularly in works like Goodbye, Columbus. Moreover, the striving of a character like the Swede in American Pastoral and the identity of Faunia Farley in The Human Stain can be further understood when considered in light of American class structure the assumptions and promises proffered by American liberalism.