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Rejoinder: subject or subjects?

Political Power and Social Theory

ISBN: 978-0-85724-325-6, eISBN: 978-0-85724-326-3

Publication date: 23 December 2010

Abstract

In addition to their desire to address the gaps in my own essay, one possible explanation rests in a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the role of ideology in middle-class identity formation, an issue that I ignored almost completely. The importance of understanding the ideological underpinnings of “middle-classness” is a point directly taken up by several of the commentators, but it is best articulated and most convincingly argued by Raka Ray in her nuanced historical examination of the national political projects that sustained the idea of a middle class as moral vanguard and repository of universal values and aspirations. She shows how the “ideological work that middle-class identity performs” sustains unity among disparate middle-class forces, at times achieving such cultural resonance that it will engage even non-middle classes in a common political project. That is, Ray argues that the idea of the middle class as a social category has become so culturally appealing and ideologically hegemonic in modern India that it has even enabled political unity behind the class projects of the elite.

Citation

Davis, D.E. (2010), "Rejoinder: subject or subjects?", Go, J. (Ed.) Political Power and Social Theory (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 323-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2010)0000021019

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited