The Anxiety of Ascent ― Middle-class Narratives in Germany and America

This intriguing book examines Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis, engaging with the idea that modern life was to be experienced as a flat procession of mechanical experiences and empty consumer consolations through a study of the lifeways of the middle-class. Beginning with the rise of the German bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twentieth century in the story of the American middle-class - both periods being marked by unprecedented economic development, social mobility and consolidation of values associated with the middle class, as well as periods of social inquiry that shaped many of the central themes and questions of the sociological tradition - it undertakes close readings of a contemporary and a retrospective text for each period in order to evaluate the long term accuracy of Weber’s claim that the modern West lacks an answer to the fundamental question of how we are to live. With readings of Gustav Freytag’s novel Debt and Credit against Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and, for the US, the domestic comedy Father Knows Best followed by a reading of the television drama Mad Men, The Anxiety of Ascent casts Weber’s narrative in a more optimistic light, pointing towards the redemptive possibilities contained within everyday life. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and scholars of cultural studies interested in morality, meaning and middle class life.

Scott Kenneth Doidge is a teaching associate in Sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.