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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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Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
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
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
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
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
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