ABSTRACT
Social scientists have puzzled over the middle classes for well over a century. At the most general level the reasons for this are straightforward. Most concepts used to analyse social divisions are simple, binary ones: that is to say, they divide people into two groups along a single axis. A great variety of concepts have been used in this way: society has been divided into the propertied and propertyless; exploiters and exploited; powerful and powerless; those functional for society and those non-functional, and so forth.
