The middle class in Italy: Reshuffling, erosion, polarization

According to data provided by Sylos Labini (1974), in 1951 the urban middle classes – defined on an occupational basis as including small entrepreneurs, public employees and private clerical workers, artisans and traders – made up 26 per cent of total population. In 1971 they were up to 39 per cent and stood at 54 per cent in 2009 (Table 9.1; Bison 2013). The number of self-employed – small entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and professional workers – soared: in the decade between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, the number of firms doubled, from 490 000 to 1 million. The structure of society changed radically, from the shape of a pyramid to that of an onion (Bagnasco 2004: 280): Italy became a country of former poor people, with the illusion of having all become ‘bourgeois’. The difficult decades of the 1970s and 1980s led to the breakdown of the social bloc that had dominated up to that time: rents, public employees and financial interests on the one hand, small and large business and their employees on the other. The new social bloc ruling in the 1980s was an alliance between big and small enterprises, classes depending on public transfers and the public sector, which was made stable by the continuous growth of the public debt (Amable and Palombarini 2014).