163 MARXISM AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASSES: French Critiques GEORGE ROSS An entire history of political sociology could be written on the theme of the "new middle classes." Whether in the guise of the "managerial revolution," "white collar," the "new working class," or the "new petite bourgeoisie," the emergence of intermediate strata in advanced industrial societies has been rediscovered more often than the wheel. Moreover, nowhere does the ideolo- gical commitment - of whatever variety - found in political sociology appear more transparently than in consideration of tiffs problem. Examples abound. German Social Democratic sociologists used the appearance of the new mittelstanden (with their alleged political moderation) as the sociological justification for their Revisionism. Later, and primarily in America, the "managerial revolution" was used by intellectuals of many political per- suasions for their own purposes, from liberal economic fundamentalists (Schumpeter, James Burnham) who saw new bureaucratic strata as decisive threats to the integrity of capitalism, to liberal pluralists (Kaysen et al.) who saw the same groups as bringing the private corporation to a new stage of socially responsible soulfulness. Then, in the America of the 1950s and 60s, in what C. Wright Mills called the "Great American Celebration," pluralist political scientists saw the burgeoning new middle classes as a new, moderate political center between polarized elites and workers and, as such, the key to American capitalism's permanent stability (S. M. Lipset's Political Man is one key source here). This analysis was exported in toto to England in the 1950s by "revisionist" British intellectuals to justify the strategic changes which they were urging upon the British Labor Party. This essay will examine a body of new literature on tile "new middle classes" coming from France. In general, French sociology has been noticeably silent on the new middle class question until quite recently, for one important reason. The transformations of French economic life which produced the new professional, bureaucratic, and teclmical strata usually called new middle Department of Sociology, Brandeis University