Abstract
The English word “middle-class” has experienced much more connotations and denotations-typically “bourgeoisie, ” “white-collar, ” and profession-than any other class-referring word since the latter half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalist class theories that the middle-classes have never been created until the contemporaries recognized what they call these. On the other hand, I think that they have also had the interpretation freedom to recognize “middle-classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The aforementioned typical middle-classes have emerged in such a way that the Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leaderships but still obtain inconsistent status to be recognized “middle-class” afterward in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle-class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle-classes into a modern society, contrary to the so-called class decomposition into the two poles.
