The Problem of Becoming Conscious of a Salaried New Middle Class

Extract

In my previous response to Amos Perlmutter, I was compelled to use seven pages of this valuable journal to reaffirm what I had already written on the new middle class in The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East andNorth Africa (Princeton, 1963). Perlmutter had distorted my ideas beyond recognition in his ‘Egypt and the New Middle Class’. In his rejoinder, published above, he neither acknowledges nor challenges any of these seven pages of correction. The second part of my previous response contained the preliminary statement of a new theory which expanded and reinforced these earlier conclusions on the new middle class. This new theoretical framework has since been articulated at somewhat greater lengths in ‘A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation’, Journal of International Affairs (Vol. XXIII, No. 1,1969, 54–75) and will be published next year as The Dialectics of Modernization (Princeton). Perlmutter dismisses this part of the analysis as ‘so mystical that I refuse to deal with [it] here‘. So cavalier a critic ought at least to be armed with the capacity to read. But he fails at this basic skill a second time.