“…Clean hands and the white collar put him, however symbolically, on the side of the rich' (Hobsbawm, 1996: 193). Similarly, the sociological and historiographical literature has argued that, in several historical cases, the public employee is one of the subjects that make up the middle class, together with artisans, the self-employed, liberal professionals, employees, traders and intellectuals (Röhl, 1967;Bowney, 1972;Stearns, 1979;Blumin, 1985;Archer and Blau, 1993;Kocka, 1995;Hobsbawm, 1996;Porter, 2004).…”