In contrast with traditional scholarship, which has seen a more or less uniform middle-class response to the political and economic crises of the age of fascism, this comparative study of the politics and ideology of the urban lower middle classes in Europe from 1918 to 1939 stresses the diversity and splintering of middle class constituencies under the pressures of the interwar period.

Looking at these years in countries from Eastern Europe to England, the writers focus on non-rural lower middle class groups not only as objects of elite and state manipulation—the dominant motif of traditional scholarship—but as active, often violent agents of political conflict. What political options were available to these classes in Europe after World War I, and which did they choose What were the central themes and symbols of associational leaders and politicians who said they represented the lower middle classes? The essays examine the political alliances that lower middle class groups formed, the sentiments they articulated, and interest these groups said they represented. The interplay of work structures, residential patterns, and demographic processes with political and ideological developments in the middle class are also examined.