Maintaining the Middle-Class Majority on the High-Technology Industrial Capitalist Base

Abstract

A middle-class majority in and of itself is not sufficient for the engendering of, and maintenance of, democracy. The character of the upper class, the ideology and political culture, and the stmcture of the economy and the state, are equally important. However, Aristotle’s theory of the link between a middle-class majority and a stable, relatively democratic, mixed polity,1 still holds, in that the rise of a majority middle class remains one of the critical causal factors engendering democracy.