Anxious Reproduction: Middle-Class Security, Authoritarian Protection, and the Political Economy of Continuity

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between middle-class formations and authoritarian governance through the prism of social reproduction, insecurity, and political continuity. Rather than interpreting middle-class engagements with authoritarian regimes primarily through ideology, coercion, or political alignment, the article argues that authoritarianism increasingly functions as a reproductive regime: a set of institutional, moral, and bureaucratic arrangements that promise continuity amid economic volatility, institutional erosion, and social fragmentation. Positioned between declining material security and enduring aspirations of stability, middle classes emerge as a contradictory social formation whose strategies of reproduction are both enabled and constrained by authoritarian power.Drawing on Marxist theories of reproduction, Polanyi’s analysis of social protection, Bourdieu’s work on habitus and distinction, Weber’s sociology of authority, and anthropological scholarship on governance and uncertainty, the article conceptualizes authoritarianism as a historically situated response to crises of reproduction. Through comparative illustrations from Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, it shows how authoritarian governance reorganizes access to housing, education, employment, legality, and respectability—key infrastructures of middle-class life. The article contributes to dialectical anthropology by reframing authoritarianism as a dynamic field of class practice, contradiction, and struggle rather than a fixed political form.