Are the rich the blind spot of German sociology? While there is an unmanageable body of research results for the lower income brackets and the middle class, little is actually known about the upper class. There are reasons for this: Anyone interested in social inequality focuses on the disadvantages of the low-wage earner and not on the privileges of millionaires. Or he researches the middle class because their "disappearance" seems to threaten the cohesion of society. In addition, the world of the rich is rather closed, inaccessible and shy of the public. Since they do not receive any state transfer payments, social statistics are also not available as a data source. German sociology not only knows little about its upper class, it does not even have a clear idea of it,how it differs from the rest of society.
In any case, that is Michael Hartmann's reproach, and he applies it specifically to Andreas Reckwitz, in whose “Society of Singularities” what he calls the upper class has a negligible significance.
"Short, superficial and inconsistent" is Reckwitz's portrayal of the upper class, says Hartmann.
Reckwitz divided the rich into two different classes - the old and the new upper class.
What they have in common is that they can live on their wealth without being dependent on gainful employment.
However, the new upper class still worked, and they were also much more mobile than the members of the old upper class, according to Reckwitz.
Class-specific habitus
Hartmann considers all of this questionable. In Germany, a small minority of three percent of the population can live from their own wealth. This would mean that this upper class would either be much smaller than Reckwitz assumed, or it would be much larger, but then it would not only consist of wealthy rentiers, but also of members of the social functional elite, who do not care about wealth, but their access to the The country's power centers. Hartmann also considers the mobility of this upper class, claimed not only by Reckwitz, to be a myth. In a recently published study of the German business elite, he himself was able to show that their relatives have remained astonishingly immobile. And not just in terms of their lifestyle,but also with regard to their pronounced closeness to social climbers. Since 1970, more than four-fifths of the top managers of the 100 largest German companies have come from upscale bourgeois or upper-class families, according to Hartmann. The class-specific bourgeois habitus as the decisive recruiting criterion of this elite has survived these decades relatively unscathed. You stayed to yourself.
For Andreas Reckwitz, it is ultimately a matter of allowing the upper class to merge with the new middle class. Both were based on the cultural model of an “advanced creative lifestyle”, which the middle class has meanwhile made the dominant cultural model. The differences between these two classes, however, are only of a degree, according to Reckwitz. Hartmann considers his strong thesis that the middle now dominates the upper and no longer the other way round to be at least empirically weak, if not simply wrong. Rather, he advocates the thesis that the dividing line between top and middle is still much stronger. This does not “only” apply to the lifestyle of the two classes.Studies on the current British class structure and his own on the recruitment of the German business elite would rather suggest that not only the lifestyle and habitus of the upper class, but also that of the upper bourgeoisie, differ significantly from those of the new middle class. But what would follow from that?
For Reckwitz, today's society is shaped by the conflict between the new and the old middle class, in other words between winners and losers from globalization.
If this is not the case, then the older conflict between the bourgeoisie (including the upper middle class) and the middle classes will shape society again.
This is a dispute about the fundamentals: For the cultural sociologist Reckwitz, the central social conflict today tends to run horizontally through the two middle classes, while for the elite researcher Hartmann it is still the vertical conflict axis that matters, i.e. the one from top to bottom.
Is economic power still concentrated at the top and only cultural power in the middle?