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ROAD TO THE
MIDDLE CLASS
Road to the Middle Class
Contents
Chapter 1: After the Welfare State
What will come after the welfare state?
After 120 years, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is clearly
showing its age.
Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
The conventional wisdom among western cultural elites is
that God is dead and we are well rid of him.
Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
The surprise of rednecks debouching from the Appalachians
into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities
has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the
past, now that God was dead.
Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down
The great event of the second millennium was the rise of
the world-historical middle class.
Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up
To the upper crust, the nineteenth century was a
never-ending worry. The old order
was coming to an end, the cyclical world of agriculture and its wealth in land.
Chapter 6: Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century
As we have seen, the nineteenth century was a great age of
religion. While the elite in Europe
and the United States experienced the death of God as their spiritual needs fell
away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, ordinary people in America flocked to
churches and responded in their millions to the preaching of modern prophets.
Chapter 7: The Best Schools
Everyone is in favor of education. But what do they mean? When
Mary Johnston talks about education she thinks in terms of “the best schools,
first grade to college” for the education of her children.
Chapter 8: Mutual Aid
According to the myth of the modern welfare state, the
nineteenth century was a lethal battleground in which the poor and the unskilled
wandered unprotected and forlorn against the power of employers and landlords,
men who occupied the commanding heights of the economy through their two-pronged
strategy of laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism.
Chapter 9: Living Under Law
In the country, people live under power.
In the city, people live under law.
Chapter 10: Explaining the Culture War
The previous five chapters have described the world that
ordinary people created for themselves in the city before the advent of the
welfare state.
Chapter 11: A Likely Story
Knowledge begins with a problem, with the need to make
sense of the world.
Chapter 12: The Fourth Great Awakening
During the last half of the twentieth century, the United
States experienced a period of unusual spiritual ferment and renewal.
Chapter 13: Repairing The Road
The Fourth Great Awakening gave us a wakeup call.
It called Americans to witness a new generation of people struggling on
the road to the middle class, worthy people acquiring for themselves through
enthusiastic Protestantism, an education, and a rigid regard for rules the
earnest culture of respectability that beckons like a shining city on a hill to
those who struggle in the shanties and the slums of the industrial city.
Chapter 14: The Problem of Power
The project of restoring the road to the middle class is not just a question of ideas, but of assembling
and using political power to implement ideas.
Chapter 15: The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
IN 1909, Charles W. Eliot addressed the students of Harvard on
the “Religion of the Future.
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Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital