CLASS

CLASS. "Class is obviously a difficult word," Raymond Williams wrote in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Class was a difficult word for Williams "both in its range of meanings and its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes social division." As a word in English, class probably first appeared in a Latin form, classis, during the sixteenth century. Classis was a Roman term for the differences of property among citizens. One mid-seventeenth-century scholar, Williams reports, glossed the term as "an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees" but restricted the meaning by adding "in Schools (wherein the term is most used)." In 1705 Daniel Defoe remarked, "tis plain the dearness of wages forms our people into more classes than other nations can show." Defoe identified a main force in class formation within early capitalism: the payment of wages for labor. But Defoe referred to an ambiguous plurality of classes, not to a hierarchy based on a division between employers and employed. Class in its modern sense is defined not only by the form of economic subsistence but also by a hierarchical division of labor, privilege, and authority. The formation of classes in America—followed by modern usage of the term "class" to describe them—accelerated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the commencement of the Industrial Revolution in the Atlantic basin. It began earlier, however, and occurred in relation to the historical development of race and gender.

The Division of Society into Owning and Working Classes

Long before the word "class" gave a label to the status arrangements within industrial capitalism, the conditions that the term would describe were developing. None were more important than the division between a large and growing population that owned nothing but its labor and a much smaller, profit driven population that owned productive property, whether land or tools and shops. Where this process began is a source of continuing debate, but one place to look for some of the earlier developments is early modern England. Beginning in the sixteenth century and stretching into the nineteenth century, a series of enclosure acts in England eliminated the traditional feudal rights of peasant communities to hold large pieces of land in common for general use. The termination of these rights made possible the creation of large private, individual holdings for commercial production. The English state simultaneously expanded its power to compel the dispossessed and mobile commoners to labor either in agriculture or the crafts. Commoners either worked in the new system voluntarily or were treated by the state as criminal vagrants and sentenced to workhouses. In North America, where land was much more widely available, workhouses were less common, but both forced and voluntary labor took contractual forms similar to those practiced in England: craft apprenticeships and agricultural indentures.

The indentured agricultural laborer contracted to work for a number of years for a master, or planter, in exchange for the cost of transport to the British North American colonies, not wages. During the late seventeenth century growers in the Chesapeake Bay region, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean shifted exclusively to enslaved African labor. Through the end of slavery, small planters and their families often worked alongside their handful of enslaved laborers and whites continued to do hired agricultural labor. But agricultural labor in commercial production of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton became the work of a caste of enslaved workers, distinguishing it from the wage system developing in the crafts. The craft apprentice served a master for a number of years, usually about seven or until maturity, and then became a journeyman who likely earned wages from his master. Journeymen lived with their masters until they married or became skilled enough to complete their own "masterpiece" and open their own shop. The English guilds, which enforced these relationships among craft workers and controlled prices, never crossed the Atlantic. Initially, there were fewer journeymen in craft operations in North America. Masters usually worked for themselves, perhaps with an apprentice or a journeyman. And many of those called masters were really journeymen who simply set up shop for themselves in American cities with few or no craft workers. During the late eighteenth century these masters, like many of their English counterparts, began to enlarge their operations, employing more labor and demanding more from it. These small groups of journeymen who worked together in the shops and lived together in neighborhoods apart from their masters increasingly organized themselves and found cause to strike over wages and hours. Consequently, although master bakers went on strike in New York City in 1741 and master carpenters struck in Savannah, Georgia, in 1746, demanding better prices, it was journeymen carpenters who went on strike in Philadelphia in 1791.

Between 1780 and 1840, the transformation of the craft system into a system of ownership and working classes was perhaps "one of the outstanding triumphs of nineteenth century American capitalism," according to Sean Wilenz (Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 [1984]). It was during this period that the changes in labor practices that were detectable in the eighteenth century suddenly seemed to move more rapidly, encompassing a wider demographic. Master craftsmen and shopkeepers had formed a significant—if uncertainly situated—middling class status, or rank, in the commercial cities of British North America from Boston to Savannah. But by 1815 merchant capitalists dominated some of the craft markets, such as textiles and many in this first middle class of small independent producers could no longer maintain themselves. Some masters, in crafts such as silver smithing, possessed significant wealth, but others endured hard labor and seasons of desperate want for themselves and their families. Many master craftsmen became managers working for capitalist owners who controlled the tools, inventory, and marketing and expected masters to push for the greatest possible productivity for the lowest possible wage. By 1820 New York City had twelve "manufactories" that employed twenty-five or more workers and thirty-five other facilities that employed tenor more workers. Many other masters lost their independence and became wageworkers in these early factories alongside journeymen and apprentices. After about 1820, the rise of stereotyping in printing and sweatshops in clothing and shoes heralded the expansion of mechanized, frenetic, and standardized production.

The emerging class relations of industrialization were broadly impacted by the American Revolution's ideological discourses, which lauded national and individual independence as masculine virtues. Masters who worked crafts that were still not industrialized maintained an independence that could put them in a middling rank, along with small-scale yeoman farmers. This independence was an important source of distinction—or class—and it defined white masculinity while separating it from the status of the enslaved and women, all of whom could not vote and owned little or no property. Even when they organized into citywide craft unions, larger and better organized versions of the eighteenth-century journeymen's combinations, white industrial workers were dependent on insecure employment over which they exercised little control. Class subordination and republican masculinity were contradictory. As both slave labor and wage labor expanded in the early nineteenth century, American workers discovered that "one way to make peace with the latter was to differentiate it sharply from the former," according to David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1992). African Americans both enslaved and free were stereotyped by all whites as licentious, lazy, and dangerous by nature, fit only for hard labor and dependence on whites. A model of white masculinity defined itself in terms of protecting against blackness and blacks. In nonslave states, white working-class Republican Boys harassed the free black population of the cities, chasing them from public spaces. Whites produced and eagerly attended blackface minstrel productions, which were stereotyped and distorted representations of black culture. In the slave states, whites of all classes, including workers, helped police the enslaved and protect against insurrection.

As the manufactory owners looked less for skill than for cheap, rapid output, they also participated in altering the economic role of women, creating new class cultures, particularly in the cities. In The North, the unpaid labor of women in the household helped fuel early capital accumulation by consuming and using the ever-expanding "labor-saving" devices produced by the industrial sector and reproducing the laboring population. The famous Lowell Mills in Massachusetts, one example of a regional practice, employed farm girls in factory production for fourteen hours a day at a fraction of the wages paid to men. In The larger cities, such as New York, the outwork system, in which women took wage work home, the low wages it paid, and the difficulty for these dispersed women workers to organize helped fuel a new street culture. Juvenile delinquency, attacks against women, and public intoxication all seemed more prevalent after 1820. Middle-and upper-class men sought prostitutes in the working-class neighborhoods. Workingmen had developed a moralistic and paternal attitude toward the street culture and women's labor exploitation. Middle-and upper-class women, claiming an especially moral status as women of "respectable" classes, discovered a public role in moral reform work within the workers' neighborhoods.

Racial Divisions and Rising Worker Consciousness

In the South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived, most of them were enslaved. Slaves were workers, but racism divided them from "the working class," a phrase that, as in the North, carried an often unspoken association to "white." The degree to which the slave South was capitalist and class conscious continues to be a source of debate. Slavery was principally an agricultural labor system with some feudal qualities, but it was also a source of labor for the crafts and industry. In Charleston, South Carolina, artisans employed or owned enslaved African laborers in the eighteenth century. In the antebellum period the Tredgar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia—the third-largest iron producer in the United States—used slaves for about half of its one-thousand-person labor force. Tredgar's enslaved workers earned wages, mostly for their masters, and worked in every phase of production as founders, colliers, miners, teamsters, and woodchoppers. Slaves were cheap to hire from their masters and could be made to work hard. Racism divided this biracial workforce, making strikes difficult. An unsuccessful strike by white workers at Tredgar in 1847 unsuccessfully demanded the removal of black workers.

Although the Civil War, in a sign of a growing class consciousness, workers formed the first nationwide labor unions and organizations in the United States beginning in the 1860s. In 1877 railroad workers struck after four years of depression in the economy and repeated merciless wage cuts by the railroads, engaging the Pennsylvania militia in a bloody armed confrontation at Pittsburgh and spreading the strike throughout the national rail systems. Another sign of growing class consciousness was the fact that labor organizations grew despite failures such as a massive nationwide strike effort for the eight-hour day in 1886. The Knights of Labor, an early nationwide union, rejected the antebellum model of organizing only skilled white workers and instead organized skilled and unskilled, white and black, reaching possibly one million members, or nearly 10 percent of the American workforce, in 1886. That same year the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized by a group of national and regional craft unions. The more massive industrialism became, the more massive the confrontations and workers' organizations became. In 1892 the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, had only 11,000 residents, but 3,800 of them worked in its twelve mills. When workers in Andrew Carnegie's Homestead mill went on strike that year after his associate, Henry Clay Frick, announced he would not renew the union's contract and would replace all the workers, virtually the whole town, men and women, joined in active support of the walkout. Frick hired several hundred armed soldiers, and after violent armed confrontations with the strikers and towns people, he ultimately succeeded in breaking the strike and the union. The Homestead strike and the use of armed force to break it became common during the early twentieth century and underscored the class divisions within American society.

The movement of European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and African American migrants into U.S. industries during the years between the 1890s and the 1940s greatly altered the class system. Millions of immigrant workers labored in Chicago factories and Colorado mines alongside southern-born African Americans who moved North in two great migration waves between 1910 and 1940. Both the men and women of these populations worked in industry. In 1910 nearly one-third of working women still labored in domestic service, but the numbers of women in industrial wage labor were increasing. Ten percent of married women worked for wages in 1920, the year women won the right to vote. Women's total employment reached eleven million before World War II, nearly doubling the female workforce.

These changes in the rapidly expanding industrial workforce stimulated a reformation of the middle class, both outside the corporations and within them. Problems and injustices that were of interest to philanthropic gentlemen and ladies in the British colonial, early national, and antebellum periods—orphan rescue, poor relief, and educational reform—became the concern of new intellectuals. This class not only managed the factories and corporations, but also taught in the expanding universities and colleges, administered the growing state bureaucracies, and founded settlement houses to address the poverty of the largely immigrant and working-class urban population. Their approach to social problems remained moralistic and paternal—teaching immigrant women to be "good mothers," for example—but as in the factories, where managers sought to regulate production through "scientific" discipline and efficiency, reformers adopted "scientific" methods, expanding the study of poverty and creating state welfare programs.

The Great Depression and the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt further institutionalized this new middle, bureaucratic class and removed the barriers of violence and law to union organization that employers and state governments had erected. In addition, the Great Depression delegitimized the capitalist class and its system of private corporate benefit programs. These conditions encouraged not only an expanded welfare state but vigorous union organizing: total American union membership tripled between 1932 and 1939, exceeding eight million. By the end of World War II, as many as one-third of American workers were union members. But the growing Cold War ideological tension between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II fundamentally altered class politics. After nearly a century, that "spectre" that Marx had declared was "haunting Europe" in 1848 seemed to haunt Americans anew: communism, more as a specter than as an actual mass movement, became enmeshed in American racism and class politics. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—later to merge with the AFL—expelled nine unions in 1949 and 1950 because of their refusal to purge communists. The CIO had organized 800,000 southern workers during the war, one-third of them black, but it stagnated under accusations that unions were the leading edge of a communist miscegenation plot to subvert white Christian capitalism. Many workers in the South, North, and West supported the anticommunist campaign. The mainstream of worker consciousness had never been revolutionary; rather it supported the development of a welfare state that protected laborers from the worst vicissitudes of capitalism.

In the later twentieth century, the stall in working-class organization and the relatively higher wages that industrial workers earned, compared to prewar levels, helped spark debate about the reality of class divisions in the United States among the intellectual middle classes. Qualitatively it seemed obvious that class divisions mattered in America: strikes, unions, and police repression of workers all seem to indicate serious class conflict. One Chicago worker in 1940, answering a question about whether there was a working class, expressed a common opinion when he cited class-segregated neighborhoods and social networks:

Hell, brother, you don't have to look far to know there's a workin' class. We may not say so. But look at what we do. Work. Look at who we runaround with and bull with. Workers. Look at where we live. If you can find anybody but workers in my block, I'll eat 'em." (Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 [1990])

In 1940, however, Fortune magazine announced the results of a survey showing that 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as middle class. Fortune took the results as evidence that capitalism, "the American way of life," produced general affluence, not class animosities. Fortune's findings were soon challenged by sociologists who found a majority of Americans identified as working class. Ultimately, however, querying Americans on their self placement within the class system offered few solid conclusions. As study after study tested each others' assumptions, methods, and categories and ended with different conclusions, the Left grew skeptical of the objectivity of sociological surveys and the Right grew skeptical of a putatively leftist academy.

Globalization and a New Class Formation

In 1963 the widely influential English historian E. P. Thompson insisted, in The Making of the English Working Class, that class was not a fixed social structure or a possession of a fixed set of people, hinting that sociology was looking in the wrong direction. Rather, "class" was simply "something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships." With similar logic, two American sociologists argued in the late 1980s that the role of authority and the nature of work have become "central in the capital accumulation process and … the exploitation of the working class" (Reeve Vanneman and Lyn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class [1987]). What defines class is not ownership of property or self-identification, but a person's type of labor and ability to control it. The industrial working class had been defined by hourly and insecure wage labor since its formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And workers built ever-larger organizations—first in shops, then cities, and finally, nationally—to combat this insecurity and its frequent poverty. As the globalization of industrial capitalism picked up pace in the late twentieth century, North American industrial workers watched their multinational employers move their higher-wage jobs overseas, precipitating a new class formation still unfinished at the end of the century.

The first feature of the new class formation was increased poverty and insecurity, but this "flexibility" and "efficiency" in the workforce—as corporate culture described it—yielded only a moderate degree of new militancy from worker organizations in the United States. During the last decades of the twentieth century, actual poverty—the inability to pay for necessities, such as health care and housing—among low-wage workers deepened. Meanwhile, women and minorities continued to be disproportionately represented among the lowest wage earners. The 1990s poverty rate of 13 percent—which incorporated a short-term decline in poverty among minorities—was misleading because it was calculated on the cost of food. While food prices remained more or less stagnant between the 1960s and 2000, rent and health care costs far outpaced inflation, market wage increases, and governmental adjustments in the minimum wage. Even after modest wage growth for low-wage workers during the 1990s, many American workers lived on 1973 wages at 1999 prices. A disproportionate percentage of the working-class poor were nonwhites and the working class remained divided by race, even after the civil rights movement had run its full course. The southern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had tended to address race but not class dynamics within the black community. For all its dramatic successes in expanding democracy in the United States, the urban rebellions of the 1960s could be understood as stemming from the failure of the movement to win effective solutions to economic inequalities. The 1992 rebellion in working-class black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King, made plain the depth of continuing frustration in the black working class.

A second feature of the new class formation was the official labor movement's efforts to moderate—not revolutionize—globalization and the race and gender disparities and divisions within the American class system. Unions declared a renewed interest in organizing the unorganized, democratic internal governance, international labor coalitions, antiracism and antisexism efforts, and the mobilization of workers to resist globalization on corporate terms. Alongside church, environmental, and student activists, unions supported local anti-sweatshop and living wage campaigns across the country. A Teamsters strike at the United Parcel Service in 1997 seemed to many to announce a newly assertive working class. And the thousands of union members who protested against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 alongside thousands of students and environmentalists seemed to herald a new activist, militant, mass, and global working-class agenda. The challenge seemed likely to rest in how well the labor movement could address both globalization, with its formation of industrial classes in undeveloped nation-states primarily in the Global South, and the persistent race and gender divisions within the American working class—divisions of wage scales, privileges, and opportunities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Brody, David. In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Levine, Bruce et al. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 2: From the Gilded Age to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Marx, Karl. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." In The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1978.

Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Morris, Richard B., ed. A History of the American Worker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Vanneman, Reeve, and Lyn Weber Cannon. The American Perception of Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1976. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

James O'NeilSpady

See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Civil Rights Movement ; Discrimination: Race ; Gender and Gender Roles ; Indentured Servants ; Industrial Revolution ; Knights of Labor ; Race Relations ; Slavery ; Trade Unions ; andvol. 9:The Theory of the Leisure Class .

Class

MARX, WEBER, AND DURKHEIM

STRATIFICATION

TWO CHALLENGES

THE FUTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Much has been written on class in the years since Seymour Martin Lipset wrote his entry in the first edition of this encyclopedia, published in 1968. Lipset viewed the literature on class in terms of “social stratification,” which he believed was divided into two approaches, the functionalist and the “social change” perspectives. Nevertheless, the bulk of his piece was centered not on contemporary studies, but on Karl Marx (1818–1883), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who, Lipset argued, continued to animate the central debates of his time. The classics are no less important today, but this essay will aim to balance them with the now canonical debates of the mid-twentieth century and the vast and multifaceted literature that has amassed since then.

MARX, WEBER, AND DURKHEIM

Any discussion of class must begin with Karl Marx. As Lipset once noted, while David Ricardo (1772–1823), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and others may have written about class before Marx, it was Marx who set the terms of debate for later sociological thinkers (Lipset 1968). For Marx, classes do not exist in societies where production for the group results in an equitable distribution of resources and requires that each member or unit contribute to the collective requirements of life. Classes emerge only when one subset of a community seizes private control of the means of production (e.g., land, factories) and coercively extracts surplus labor from another subset of the community, that is, labor that neither the first group needs nor the second group must give in order to survive.

Marx viewed the extraction of surplus labor as a fundamentally exploitative act, since the real exchange value of any given commodity is only ever equal to the labor time socially necessary to make it. This is called the labor theory of value. Any effort to squeeze out surplus value requires that human beings be forced to work for free beyond the labor time socially necessary both to maintain their labor power (e.g., through food and raiment) and to produce its equivalent in commodities. Thus, one’s class is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production: those who own the means of production and therefore forcibly extract surplus value comprise one class, while those who do not own the means of production and are therefore coerced to generate surplus value form another class. Like master and bondsman under slavery and lord and serf under feudalism, capitalism is predicated on two classes: the factory owners or bourgeoisie and the factory workers or proletariat. All of these, however, only form “objective” classes, meaning that they are classes determined merely by their proprietary relationship to the means of production. The subjective form of class, by contrast, is a class that is conscious of itself as a collectivity of similarly positioned individuals and is therefore capable of class action. The distinction between objective and subjective forms of class is infamously that of the class-in-itself (an sich ) and the class-for-itself (für sich ).

According to some interpretations of Marx’s work, particularly those of the Communist Manifesto (1848), the transition from a merely existing working class to a conscious and therefore revolutionary working class is inevitable, as is the classless communist society that workers will eventually found. Because of its revolutionary and progressive potential in every epoch of production, class is said to be the very motor of history (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998; Marx [1852] 1996; Marx [1867] 1906). Hence, the oft-quoted claim,“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998, p. 34).

Max Weber did not doubt the existence of exploitative class relations in modern society. Rather, he questioned Marx’s definition of class, its centrality in modern life compared to other forms of domination, and the apparent inevitability of class action in Marx’s work. In Weber’s foundational piece on this subject,“Class, Status, Party” (1922), class is conceived of not as a group but as a sea of unconnected individuals who share the same “life chances,” of which ownership of the means of production is just one example. Life chances comprise the bargaining power that one brings to the market for the purpose of maximizing income and includes professional authority, skills, and education. Just because one shares a similar set of life chances with others, however, does not mean that one will join with similarly positioned individuals in class action. Shared life chances are a necessary condition of class action, but they are by no means a guarantee, for there are other forms of domination apart from the economic that have the capacity to contravene class action. Societies that are organized according to “status” are less susceptible to class action, because they are stratified according to noneconomic concerns such as family, ethnic, or religious heritage. Partisan allegiances may also be an impediment to class solidarity (Weber 1946).

Émile Durkheim’s foremost contribution to class analysis was to conceive of it in terms of occupational specialization in a modern and largely peaceful division of labor. Durkheim sought to explain the transition from the “mechanical solidarity” of primitive societies, whose coherence was based on the resemblance of actors and the dominance of a collective consciousness, to the “organic solidarity” characteristic of modern societies, whose coherence was based on the complementarity of highly specialized individuals. Organic solidarity breaks down only when individuals are coerced into tasks that they do not want to perform. Thus, the central challenge of modern societies is to match individuals with tasks that suit their natural talents. This is why organic solidarity may be achieved by contracts or exchange, which bind individuals through a system of rights and duties, and in turn give rise to rules that guarantee regular cooperation between the divided functions (Durkheim [1893] 1960).

STRATIFICATION

Kingsley Davis (1908–1997) and Wilbert Moore’s (1914–1987) now-foundational piece,“Some Principles of Stratification” (1945), marked the translation of Durkheimian sociology into contemporary debates on class. Davis and Moore took as their challenge the question of how modern societies so successfully channeled their members into an elaborate and specialized division of labor. Infusing Durkheim with Weber’s emphasis on skills as life chances on the market, they reasoned that this monumental undertaking would require nothing less than a mechanism that could motivate the most qualified people to train for, seek, and perform the duties of the most important positions. Famously they hypothesized that an unequal system of occupational rewards was necessary to track the talented to their rightful place in the division of labor. Thus, professionals earn more than manual laborers, because the former positions must have greater builtin economic incentives to motivate the most highly talented to undertake the costly educational sacrifice necessary for those jobs. Social inequality, in other words, was not the result of the exploitation of one part of society by another and therefore a thing to be abhorred, but merely the system through which society unconsciously placed its most talented members into the most functionally important roles, without which society would be imperiled.

Among the more prominent early responses to Davis and Moore was that of Melvin Tumin (1919–1994), who argued that “functional importance” is an ideological construct. Power, he insisted, is a better measure of who gets ahead, such that the result of stratification, far from tracking the most talented people to the top, actually strangles talent at the bottom, making stratification deeply dysfunctional. Later Lipset and Reinhard Bendix (1916– 1991) showed conclusively that the belief in upward mobility far exceeded the actual rate in the United States, while Peter Blau (1918–2002) and Otis Duncan (1921– 2004) introduced path analysis to demonstrate the enduring effects of parental background and schooling on occupational attainment (Tumin 1953; Lipset and Bendix 1959; Blau and Duncan 1967).

But if Davis and Moore marked the introduction of Durkheim and Weber into the functionalist approach to class, then Ralf Dahrendorf (1957), the founder of modern conflict theory, did so for Marx and Weber. Dahrendorf sought to create an alternative to Talcott Parsons’s (1902–1979) functionalist social system that could better account for internal conflict. A “Left Weberian” who saw class as fundamentally exploitative, Dahrendorf argued that Marx’s focus on property as the ultimate marker of class was limited, especially in light of the control exercised by nonowner managers. Property and the coercive extraction of surplus value were for him subordinate forms of a more general social relation, authority, which served as the basis of binary “class conflict” in a variety of social settings including, but not limited to, industrial production. Dahrendorf, however, was criticized for expanding the meaning of class so far beyond the economic realm as to make the term meaningless (see, for example, Coser 1960).

Responding to Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979), whose Political Power and Social Classes (1973) identified a “new petty bourgeoisie,” Erik Olin Wright (1978, 1997) argued that a new class of white-collar workers had emerged as a result of elaborate organizational hierarchies and the separation of ownership from directive control of large industrial corporations (Giddens and Held 1982). Workers and owners continued to occupy diametrically opposed class positions, but white-collar workers had come to occupy “contradictory class locations” in which the latter enjoyed some degree or combination of autonomy, skill, and authority on the job. Though critics have argued that Wright smuggled Weber into his Marxist framework by expanding the basis of class location beyond exploitation and production, Wright nevertheless found a dividing line between white-collar employees who identify more with labor and those who identify more with capital, thus articulating a bourgeois-proletarian divide for a new age.

TWO CHALLENGES

In the aftermath of the Soviets’ repression of democratic movements in Hungary (1956–1957) and Czechoslovakia (1968–1969), class analysis and in particular Marxism were assailed on several fronts both for what was seen as the perversion of Marx’s humanist vision by state-sponsored socialism and for the exclusion of non-class-based identities, inequalities, and movements from public discourse. With respect to the latter, Frank Parkin (1979), another Left Weberian like Dahrendorf, criticized structural Marxism’s assumption of internally homogeneous classes, as well as its inability to account for the enforcement of social boundaries between elites and workers. As an alternative, Parkin advanced the concept of “social closure,” the process by which social collectivities, whether by class, race, gender, or a combination of these, seek either to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities (in the case of elites) or to usurp rewards previously denied to them (in the case of nonelites).

Alberto Melucci (1980) likewise criticized the social-movement literature for emphasizing the political realm of movement activity while neglecting its nonpolitical or “social” dimensions. This, he noted, made sense in the study of working-class movements, which often have an institutionalized political arm, but did not square with women’s movements, for instance, which, in addition to struggling for political rights, also seek to address social concerns of difference and recognition and do not vie for state power. More recently, Sonya Rose (1992) has argued that gender is not a secondary by-product of class relations as Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and some Marxist feminists have suggested, but rather a central component thereof. Thus, in late nineteenth-century England, factory wages were adjusted by gender not only to the benefit of capital, but also to the benefit of men, as it reinforced a discourse of female respectability tied to the subordination of women in the household and society at large.

E. P. Thompson’s (1924–1993) critique of structural Marxism in the Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a lightning rod for emerging controversies within Marxism itself. The main point of this critique is that workers do not constitute a class because they share a similar structural position, but because they forge themselves into a class through their own language, culture, and struggle. The working class on this account is always already a conspirator in its own creation, thereby negating the analytical necessity for the in-itself/for-itself dichotomy. This challenge to the structural Marxism of Poulantzas, Perry Anderson (1980), and Louis Althusser (1971), among others, was led initially by the British cultural studies school of Thompson, Raymond Williams (1977), and sociologist Stuart Hall (1983).

Subsequent research, not all Marxist, has celebrated the agency of class actors, as in James Scott’s account of subversive everyday behavior in Weapons of the Weak (1985); the indigenous culture of workers, such as Craig Calhoun’s “reactionary revolutionaries”; and the proces-sual, as opposed to the positional, dimensions of class formation exemplified by Anthony Giddens’s concept of “structuration” and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002)“habitus” (Bourdieu 1977; Przeworski 1978; Sewell 1980; Calhoun 1983; Bourdieu 1984; Giddens 1984; Katznelson and Zolberg 1985; Fantasia 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Steinmetz 1992; Somers 1997).

For Bourdieu, as an example, class typically functions at the level of shared dispositions or habitus (e.g., tastes, bodily carriage, language), which, though stemming from certain shared material conditions, manifests itself more as a “feel for the game” than as a primarily economic relationship. One is, without the effort of reflection, a “virtuoso” in negotiating the social terrain of one’s class, very much as a professional soccer player, to use Bourdieu’s analogy, knows precisely when and with what force and curvature to kick the ball in a breakaway situation. These dispositions only emerge recognizably as “class” when crises drag the material and dispositional differences among groups from the field of the unspoken (referred to as doxa ) to the field of public opinion. Habitus, it is important to note, is not a fixed set of dispositions, but rather given to improvisation and thus to transforming the terms of class belonging. The analytical result is that class, through habitus, is neither structure nor agency, but structuring or both simultaneously.

THE FUTURE

One possible implication of this constant reworking of class is that it is no longer a workable analytical concept. Paul Kingston’s The Classless Society (2000) is among the latest in a long line of studies that question the predictive power of class in shaping mobility, culture, voting, and consciousness, among other outcomes. On the other hand, there is a movement afoot to rebuild class analysis. David Grusky and Jesper Sørensen (1998), for example, contend that class models can be made more plausible if analysts radically disaggregate occupational categories to the unit occupational level. Moreover, the eclipse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the attendant rise of neoliber-alism have put the question of class back on the table if there had ever been any doubt. Noting the deepening class polarization since the late 1970s, David Harvey (2006) has argued that neoliberalism is a failed utopian rhetoric masking a far more successful project to restore economic power to the ruling classes. Future lines of inquiry include new forms of international class formation, the evolving relationship of party to class as the institutionalized Left goes into decline, and the disappearance of wage-based employment and thus of the very basis of social citizenship and welfare.

SEE ALSO Bahro, Rudolf; Bourdieu, Pierre; Bureaucracy; Capitalism; Class Conflict; Durkheim, Émile; Elites; False Consciousness; Feudal Mode of Production; Feudalism; Habitus; Hierarchy; Labor; Labor Theory of Value; Left and Right; Marx, Karl; Mode of Production; New Class, The; Oligarchy; Poulantzas, Nicos; Power Elite; Ricardo, David; Slave Mode of Production; Smith, Adam; Stratification; Surplus; Thompson, Edward P.; Weber, Max; Working Class

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Blau, Peter M., and Otis Dudley Duncan. 1967. The American Occupational Structure. New York: Wiley.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity.

Calhoun, Craig Jackson. 1983. The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language? American Journal of Sociology 88: 886–914.

Coser, Lewis A. 1960. Review of Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society by Ralf Dahrendorf. American Journal of Sociology 65: 520–521.

Dahrendorf, Ralf. [1957] 1959. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Davis, Kingsley, and Wilbert E. Moore. 1945. Some Principles of Stratification. American Sociological Review 10: 242–249.

Durkheim, Émile. [1893] 1960. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. George Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Engels, Friedrich. [1884] 1972. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. New York: International Publishers.

Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Cedric de Leon

CLASS.

The term class is used in a wide range of intellectual discourses, including logic, the natural sciences, and pedagogy. At its Latin origins, however, classis was first and foremost a social term, denoting the division of the Roman people attributed to King Servius Tullius (r. 578–534 b.c.e.). In early Rome, class connoted a distinction in rank between those who paid tribute (property tax) and those who did not, as well as the system of divisions between types of military service. In particular, classis often seems to have been reserved to describe citizens on the lower social and economic rungs. Only after the principate of Augustus (31 b.c.e.–14 a.d.) did classis come to be employed in a more general sense to mean a division of all sorts of things into groups.

Early Histories

The Latin genesis of class nomenclature does not mean that the idea behind it (in either a social or general sense) did not exist prior to the rise of the Roman Republic. Aristotle's Organon proposed a logical system of classification of natural and linguistic types into genus and species according to categorical criteria. For the ancient Greeks, the Few and the Many constituted a central measure of division within the social order. Both Plato and Aristotle divided social groups into functional classes whose status and power was graded according to the contributions each made to the purposes of the civil community as a whole. Plato's Republic famously identified within the city three parts—rulers, soldiers, and laborers—while Aristotle distinguished six socioeconomic classes—soldiers, priests, judges, farmers, artisans, and traders—of whom only the first three were deemed fully qualified to exercise the rights associated with citizenship, at least in the best political system.

Class thus has generally been associated with systems of social exclusion. Indeed, elaborate mythologies have been generated to support or justify class divisions. The tale of Noah's curse on the descendents of his son Ham, in Genesis 9:20–27, has been taken as an explanation for class inequality. Likewise, the Koran (Sura 43:31) declares that social differentiation arises from Allah's will that the inferior should be subjected to the superior. The caste system that long governed social organization and relations in India and elsewhere in Asia purported to reflect the disparate origins of the various groups as described in the Vedas: the Brahmans from the lips of Brahma, the Kshatriya from the shoulders, the Vaisya from the thighs, and the Sudra from the feet.

During the European Middle Ages, the idea behind class distinctions was popularly captured by various forms of organic unities. Many medieval thinkers, quite possibly under the indirect influence of Plato, divided society into the threefold functional ordering of those who fight, those who work, and those who pray. In the High Middle Ages, this was gradually replaced by the more developed organic doctrine of the body politic, the most influential exponent of which was John of Salisbury (1115 or 1120–1180). His Policraticus (completed 1159) contained an extensive account of how each of the organs and limbs of the human body—from the head to the toes—had a direct counterpart in society, from the king, his advisors, soldiers, and diverse magistrates all the way down to the peasants and artisans. Class divisions were natural and necessary in order to maintain justice and the common good. Essentially this view enjoyed wide currency in Europe well into early modern times.

The Renewal of Class

For the first millennium and more of European history, the term class was not invoked in order to describe the distinctions between and identities of social groups. Rather, class was invoked through what we might call "status language," such as gradus in Latin, état in French, Stand in German, and "orders" or "estates" in English. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, a notable linguistic shift that renewed the nomenclature of class appeared in most major European languages. This change seems to have accompanied the transformations wrought by the industrial revolution and the rise of political economy: class conveyed an essential economic overtone that was not fully captured by the status language of earlier times. The work of authors such as Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) did much to disseminate class discourse, and especially phrases such as "the laboring classes" and "the working class."

The nineteenth century was the heyday of discussions about class in this updated economic sense. Class divisions were upheld by classical political economy on the grounds that the division of labor and the competition implied therein were necessary for the efficient use of productive resources. Critics of capitalism, whether communitarians such as Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) or utopians such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837) or anarchists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), remained convinced that the sources of exploitation were not inherent in class divisions per se so much as in unequal distribution of property or wages or the material benefits of work. Differentiation in the contributions made by laborers thus did not excuse their subordination in economic, political, or social standing.

The Marxist Transformation

Without doubt, the most famous promulgator of the idea of class in the modern world was also its most profound critic: Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx treated class distinction as a universal characteristic of human history from the earliest times of social organization until his own day. For Marx, classes were economic groups constituted by differential access to the means of production—that is, the technologies and natural resources necessary for human beings to reproduce their physical existence. In every social formation, there were two essential and contending classes: a working class, which used, but did not directly own or control, the means of production; and an appropriating class, which lived directly or indirectly from the labor of workers. In different economic systems, the type and nature of technology, and of the social relationships employed in organizing labor and maintaining domination over it, might vary considerably. Hence, tribal societies met the physical and extraphysical needs of their members differently than did subsequent ancient slave or feudal systems. But the fundamental clash of interests between workers and appropriators was a permanent feature of history up to the present day.

In previous social systems, Marx held, the struggle between the classes had wound up with the replacement of one exploitative mode of production (the material and social elements of the economy) with another, culminating in capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism, with its veneer of freedom and equality, produced the most intense exploitation of the worker ever achieved. Yet, on the other hand, just because the condition of the capitalist working class, termed the proletariat, was so degraded, Marx believed that it formed a "universal class," capable of releasing and realizing all of the untapped potential of a truly liberated humanity. For this reason, Marx held that the proletariat, once it became conscious of its own circumstances and the source of its immiseration, would revolt against its capitalist oppressors and would generate a qualitatively different kind of society. The future society, which Marx called communism, would be classless, since the proletariat, as the most completely exploited class in history, would have no remaining object to exploit. Communism would see the end of human history as a dynamic series of class struggles and would instead herald a new beginning of history in which each and every individual as a full human being would have the opportunity to pursue and attain his or her freely chosen needs.

The Weberian Reply

The primary response to Marx's conception of class was proposed by the German sociological thinker Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber's main insight was to recognize the empirical faults of an exclusive emphasis on class as an economic phenomenon. Rather, Weber saw society—in particular, in the modern world—as far too complex in its stratification to fit into the straightjacket of economic determinism. It should be noted that Weber's critique was directed not just at Marx and other radical critics of capitalism, but also at the classical political economists, who shared with Marxism a stridently economistic orientation.

In one sense, Weber does adopt an economic conception of class ; it is the term he employs to designate social differentiation based on occupation and function as defined by the market. But class is simply one form of distinction. Equally important are status and power. Status denotes the factors of honor and reputation that attach to specific ways of life and are accorded deference by others. Thus, individuals of certain status (say, from a landed nobility) may enjoy greater repute than those of a given class who are wealthier but whose sources of income (say, commerce) are generally held to be debased or ignoble. Power applies to the capability of a group to impose its collective will on others, even in the face of their resistance. Weber points out how, in the modern world, those with the greatest class position or status often do not occupy the positions of administrative or bureaucratic authority. In turn, bureaucrats can and do enact policies that run contrary to the real or perceived interests of economic and reputational elites. This demonstrates that their social position depends on a source—power—that cannot be entirely assimilated to class or status.

Later social scientists have extended and enlarged the factors that influence social differentiation well beyond Weber's original triad. Such elements as kinship, occupation, race and ethnicity, and education have been added to the basic dimensions of class, status, and power. But it seems safe to say that the dominant perspective on social stratification both normatively and empirically during the last century remained Weberian in orientation.

Marxist Rejoinders

Somewhat ironically, many of the fiercest critics of the classical Marxist doctrine of class would consider themselves to fall into the Marxist camp. The failure of the proletariat to rise up against and to crush capitalism even as the conditions of its exploitation worsened led some Marxists, especially in Western Europe, to revisit Marx's conception of class struggle. The so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory renounced the crass economism of classical Marxism in favor of an analysis that emphasized the cultural sources of working-class conservatism, including the mass media, out-group scapegoating (anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic and racial hatred), and the predominance of so-called technological rationality. Members of the Frankfurt School embraced, alternately, pessimism about the possibility of successful class struggle (as in the work of Max Horkheimer [1895–1973] and Theodor W. Adorno [1903–1969]) or optimism that other marginalized groups, such as racial minorities, students, denizens of Third World nations, women, and environmentalists, might become the bearers of the revolutionary subjectivity of Marx's proletariat (as Herbert Marcuse [1898–1979] asserted). In either instance, traditional Marxian class analysis leading to proletarian revolution was set aside as an unrealistic and unrealizable expectation.

Another school of Marxist thought, drawing upon the rigorous methodological principles of modern economics and the other social sciences, sought to wed so-called rational choice doctrines of economic behavior to a radical worldview. Authors such as Jon Elster (b. 1940) and John Roemer (b. 1938) argue that class should be reinterpreted according to the standards of methodological individualism, so that a class is not greater than the sum of its parts, but a coordinated body of similarly positioned individual agents. Known as "rational choice" or "analytical" Marxism, this approach attempts to strip class of perceived metaphysical accretions—for example, the holism criticized by Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994)—without eliminating it as a workable foundation for a viable theory of economic exploitation.

Still other thinkers within a Marxist vein have set out to restore the "political" dimension to Marx's conception of class struggle. Historians such as Robert Brenner (b. 1943) and political theorists such as Ellen Meiksins Wood (b. 1939) stress the contingency of class relations depending on political context, and thus they foreground local juridical-coercive institutions in understanding the constitution of class identities. This perspective insists on the wholly illusory nature of the supposed separation of the economic and the political under capitalism. Political power shapes class conflict, and thus the state itself is the prime site for class struggle and opposition.

Beyond Class

An important trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been to resist both Marxian and Weberian theories of social differentiation in favor of other fundamental sources of division among human beings. Feminism provides an example of one such line of reasoning. Feminist theory claims that gender, rather than class, constitutes the defining division in human historical dynamics. Broadly stated, feminists assert that reproduction trumps production as the organizing principle around which human social institutions are fixed. Thus, it is the gender divide, emerging from the male oppression of women, that drives social processes throughout history. Patriarchalism, not classism, constitutes the major division among human beings, and the obsession with class is itself a patriarchal trick to divert attention from the fundamental struggle between the sexes.

Class-oriented conceptions of social power and dynamic have also come under attack from proponents of critical race theory. The orientation of critical race theory raises questions quite similar to those of traditional Marxism concerning the ways in which state power (in its legal-juridical and coercive applications) reinscribes and reinforces racial divides. Thus, just as gender is foregrounded in feminist analysis, so race becomes the central focus of analysis among proponents of the critical race school.

The Future of Class?

Class has become anathema in political discourse in the West. Politicians are able to silence their opponents with the mere assertion that "class war" is being invoked. Liberalism—democracy's insistence that equality constitutes the salient feature of social life—even in spite of the evident social, economic, racial, and political disparities that exist in liberal-democratic regimes—suggests that class is effectively dead as a category of social analysis and critique. Yet the discourse of class seems to reappear regularly among the intellectual categories with which social thinkers, and social movements, narrate their self-understandings. May class yet outlive those whose interests prescribe its obsolescence?

See also Communism ; Critical Race Theory ; Marxism ; Power .

bibliography

Brennan, Catherine. Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification: An Introduction and Critique. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997.

Brown, Donald E. Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Calvert, Peter. The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction. New York: St. Martin's, 1982.

Carling, Alan H. Social Division. London: Verso, 1991.

Clark, Terry Nichols, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. The Breakdown of Class Politics: A Debate on Post-Industrial Stratification. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: Norton, 1995.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.

Horowitz, Maryanne C., ed. Race, Class, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1991.

Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

McNall, Scott G., Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds. Bringing Class Back in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991.

Moravcsik, J. M. E., ed. Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1968.

Roemer, John, ed. Analytical Marxism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Russ, Joanna. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Cary J. Nederman

class is about power. The history of social class is about the way in which men and women gained and used power over others, in matters of government and the state, in ideas, culture, and education, but above all in the relationships of production and consumption. The concept of social class has been and is used by historians in their struggle to understand the experience, social relationships, and social conflicts of past and present.

By the 1960s, historians had established the major outlines of this story. Sometime in the late 18th–early 19th cent., the way in which the British people began to think about their own society and the way in which the major conflicts and relationships of that society developed began to change. Eighteenth-cent. society was a hierarchy of ranks and orders held together by relationships of deference and patronage, although the sense of a bi-polar division of rich and poor, rulers and ruled, aristocracy and people might inform debates on poverty, consumption, and the nature of the constitution. The new relationships and consciousness of class were associated with economic change, with the dominance of capitalist property relationships, with the intensity of competition in commerce, and, above all, with the reorganization of work through the division of labour and new machine-based, often steam-driven, technologies. Early conflicts were associated with trade unionism and the new technologies. The 1830s and 1840s were decades of intense conflict associated with constitutional change. There were key periods of industrial conflict in the 1880s and the quarter-century before 1926.

Social class was used to explain a wide variety of other changes and relationships. The demographic transition to low birth rates and low death rates was linked to middle-class experience in the second half of the 19th cent. and then filtered down to skilled and then unskilled working-class people. The voting patterns and political behaviour of the 20th cent. and the rise of the modern Labour and Tory Parties were related to middle- and working-class interests. Class was related to privilege in housing and education, to habits of dress, food consumption, and speech.

Behind this interpretation lay a series of assumptions. British writing was dominated by a three-class model, loosely related to the three factors of production identified by Ricardo in 1817. The aristocracy were rent takers, the middle class were profit takers, and the working class wage earners. A rigid Marxist presentation assuming an increasingly divisive conflict between capital and labour was rare, but the notion of a potential conflict derived from relationships to the means of production and the stabilization of this conflict in the 1850s and 1860s was central to the story. Explicit references to the ideas of Max Weber are even rarer, but his assumptions provide valuable guidance. Class was related to market position and hence involved privileges of education as well as property. Class was related to status which involved recognition by others in social status or ‘social honour’.

This story has been questioned. Eighteenth-cent. historians have identified a ‘middling sort’ not least in patterns of consumption. The re-examination of the political events of the 1830s and 1840s, especially the language of those contests, yields little evidence of self-aware conflict groups based upon economic relationships. The closer study of work revealed a lack of homogeneity of experience within the major social classes. Divisions within classes, of gender, party, religion, region, ethnicity, were seen as providing identities more dominant than class itself.

Social class has lost its privileged position in the narrative of British social history, but it remains a crucial means of explaining the conflicts and inequalities that arose and arise from the relationships of production and consumption, not least because, in the last 200 years, the language of class has been used in covert and overt ways by the people of Britain.

See also social history.

R. J. Morris

class. The class structure of modern Ireland has been moulded by a number of factors, both external and internal. The colonial and imperial relationship with Britain led to a situation where the various collectivities within the island tended not to relate to each other directly, but mediated their relationships through the British link. The internal dynamic of conflict in the 19th century came to focus on the question of nationalism versus unionism rather than on the ownership and control of the means of production. In objective terms, 19th‐century Ireland had a clear class structure where various groups (tenants, labourers, landlords, industrial workers, bourgeoisie) often came into conflict over the allocation, control, and ownership of resources. Agrarian agitation and the Land War provide one example of this.

What was absent from the Irish situation, in contrast to other European countries, was the emergence of a class for itself, the construction of a distinct class‐consciousness which welded people together around common concerns and actions. The formation of the European socialist parties were an index of this process in Europe. In Ireland, questions of religion, nation, and ethnicity caused cleavages which continually disrupted any movement towards class politics.

Attempts were made to raise the class question, or to merge it with the national cause. James Connolly championed a socialist republic, and James Larkin's trade union agitation had a distinct class flavour. However, class politics was subordinated to the national question and de Valera's comment that ‘labour must wait’ aptly encapsulated the situation. Partition reinforced the subordination of class to nation as well as ensuring that the southern economy would be dominated by the agricultural sectors until the 1960s.

Significant changes to the class structure did not begin to occur until the 1960s. In the Republic, the ending of economic protectionism in 1958 and entry into the European Union in 1972 led to a decline in small‐scale local industry and agriculture and a shift towards more service‐based occupations. More jobs became knowledge based, leading to an expansion in higher education, and the traditional classes of agricultural labourers and industrial workers (both skilled and unskilled) entered a period of rapid contraction. Women began to enter the workforce in greater numbers. In Northern Ireland, the collapse of traditional male‐dominated heavy industry and the rapid decline of the textile industry—mainly staffed by low‐paid female labour—brought about a broadly similar pattern of change, which was reinforced by the rapid expansion of the state sector in the 1970s. In both parts of Ireland the most significant changes to the class structure were the increased involvement of women in the workforce, the expansion of the state and service sector, and the spread of knowledge‐based occupations.

The last two decades in the Republic have seen a change in this pattern where politics were dominated by the divisions of the Civil War. Politics have assumed a new volatility as the class basis of traditional politics changed and the class structure assumed a form similar to other western European countries. Loyalty to a particular party has declined and significant sectors of the new class and occupational structure have no political allegiances or display a shifting and opportunist attitude. The political effects of changes in the class structure are less visible in Northern Ireland. Although the changes have, if anything, been more far reaching, effects on traditional political allegiances have been slight. There is little evidence that the pattern of ethnic allegiances in politics and voting preferences has undergone any significant change.

Bibliography

Hutton, S., and and Stewart, P. , Ireland's Histories: Aspects of State, Society and Ideology (1991)

J. P. Smyth

class interest The basic concept of class interest derives from Karl Marx's theory of social class. Marx argued that the social relations which define class generate inherently opposing interests. Hence, for example, the interests of the bourgeoisie are different from and antagonistic towards those of the proletariat. It is in the interests of the bourgeois class to exploit the proletariat and in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Note that this definition of interest is in-built to the definition of class: classes have objective interests. As the American Marxist Erik Olin Wright puts it, ‘class structure is … a terrain of social relations that determine objective material interests of actors, and class struggle is understood as the forms of social practices which attempt to realize those interests [and] class consciousness can be understood as the subjective processes that shape intentional choices with respect to those interests and struggles’ (see his Classes, 1985
). Here it is possible to see the role assigned to the concept of class interests within a Marxist theory of class action.

However, there are many problems with this concept. In particular, it is more satisfactory to examine how far objective conditions actually exist, which are sufficiently similar for there to be the possibility of common interests emerging. What form those interests might take also becomes an empirical question. Hence, for example, David Lockwood has noted how workers form attachments to (rather than antagonisms towards) the existing form of capitalist society, through the activities of trade unions. John H. Goldthorpe, on the other hand, argues that whether or not individuals become conscious of possessing a class identity, and seek to pursue common class interests with others similarly placed, will depend in part upon the nature and degree of ‘demographic class formation’; that is, ‘the empirical question … of how far classes have in fact formed … in the sense of specific social collectivities … that are identifiable through the degree of continuity with which, in consequence of patterns of class mobility and immobility, their members are associated with particular sets of positions over time’ (see Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1980
). But neither Goldthorpe nor Lockwood assumes that there are objective class interests. Rather, each argues that the interests pursued by a class or its representatives are contingent upon a complex pattern of historical and political circumstances, and emerge out of social action rather than being an inherent condition of such action. In particular, people have to assume social identities as members of a class, before it becomes possible for sociologists to identify its interests.

class is about power. The concept of social class has been used by historians to understand the experience, social relationships, and social conflicts of past and present. By the 1960s, historians had established the major outlines of this story. Sometime in the late 18th–early 19th cent., the way in which the British people began to think about their own society began to change. Eighteenth‐cent. society was a hierarchy of ranks and orders held together by relationships of deference and patronage. The new relationships and consciousness of class were associated with economic change, with the dominance of capitalist relationships, and, above all, with the reorganization of work through the division of labour and new machine‐based technologies. Early conflicts were associated with trade unionism and the new technologies. The 1830s and 1840s were decades of conflict associated with constitutional change. There were key periods of industrial conflict in the 1880s and the quarter‐century before 1926.

Behind this interpretation lay a series of assumptions. British writing was dominated by a three‐class model, loosely related to the three factors of production identified by Ricardo in 1817. The aristocracy were rent takers, the middle class were profit takers, and the working class wage earners. A rigid Marxist presentation assuming an increasingly divisive conflict between capital and labour was rare, but the notion of a potential conflict was central to the story. Class was related to market position and hence involved privileges of education as well as property.

This story has been questioned. Eighteenth‐cent. historians have identified a ‘middling sort’ not least in patterns of consumption. The re‐examination of the political events of the 1830s and 1840s yields little evidence of self‐aware conflict groups based upon economic relationships. The closer study of work revealed a lack of homogeneity of experience within the major social classes. Divisions within classes, of gender, party, religion, region, ethnicity, were seen as providing identities more dominant than class itself.

class imagery The commonsense or everyday beliefs about social class that are held by ordinary members of society—particularly in respect of the number, size, and characteristics of the various classes in their society.

Studies of social stratification often distinguish objective and subjective structure, the former pertaining to relationships of power or privilege, the latter being the domain of class imagery. The term itself dates from 1957 and gained British currency through David Lockwood's influential work on working-class images of society (see M. Bulmer ( ed.) , Working-Class Images of Society, 1975
).

Two accounts of subjective stratification exist. One is Marxist, in which consciousness or awareness of the class structure is postulated as arising from class conflict and experience of social inequality, and any departure from a conception based on class interest is deemed to be false consciousness. Reputationalist studies, on the other hand, based on community studies of class and occupational prestige, have also detected different perceptions of the class structure, noting that people differ in the extent to which their image is dichotomous (‘us’ versus ‘them’) or multiple and finely graded. Different bases for these images or models (such as power and money) have been described by a number of sociologists—but, in most cases, systematic class images are difficult to identify empirically. The most recent studies of class imagery and connotations suggest that there exists a more fluid, complex, and open stock of such class and occupational images and meanings than is usually assumed, and that individuals use different imagery and conceptions for different purposes and strategies (see, for example, N. Britten , ‘Class Imagery in a National Sample of Women and Men’, British Journal of Sociology, 1984
).

class / klas/ • n. 1. a set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind, type, or quality: the accommodations were good for a hotel of this class. ∎  Biol. a principal taxonomic grouping that ranks above order and below phylum or division, such as Mammalia or Insecta. 2. the system of ordering a society in which people are divided into sets based on perceived social or economic status: people who are socially disenfranchised by class. ∎  a set in a society ordered in such a way: the ruling class. ∎  (the classes) archaic the rich or educated. ∎ inf. impressive stylishness in appearance or behavior: she's got class—she looks like a princess. 3. a group of students who are taught together. ∎  an occasion when students meet with their teacher for instruction; a lesson: I was late for a class. ∎  a course of instruction: I took classes in Indian music. ∎  all those graduating from a school or college in a particular year: the class of 1907. • v. [tr.] (often be classed as) assign or regard as belonging to a particular category: conduct that is classed as criminal. • adj. inf. showing stylish excellence: he's a class player. PHRASES: class act a person or thing displaying impressive and stylish excellence. in a class of (or on) its (or one's) own unequaled, esp. in excellence or performance: the delicacy of English roses puts them in a class of their own.

class awareness A term—broadly synonymous with ‘class identification’—referring to the subjective definition and interpretation of social class in the public consciousness. Sociological investigations of class awareness therefore examine the class labels (if any) that are commonly used in popular discourse; the extent to which people personally identify with these labels; which factors determine identification with particular classes; and the implications of class identities for broader political orientations and social behaviour generally. The term has a much wider currency in the United States than in Britain or Europe, mainly because it carries less of the ideological baggage associated with the Marxist notion of class consciousness, although there are obvious overlaps between the two concepts and indeed in the relevant sociological literatures. For example, and rather confusedly, Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon (The American Perception of Class, 1987) argue that lack of an organized working-class movement in the United States does not mean that American workers lack class consciousness—by which the authors mean class images and identities that affect other perceptions of society (in other words class awareness). It is doubtful whether this minimal conception of class consciousness would be accepted by Marxists or other class analysts. A more typical (and probably the best) treatment of the American material is Mary R. Jackman and Robert W. Jackman's Class Awareness in the United States (1983). See also CLASS IMAGERY.

class culture During the 1980s, a number of (mainly American) sociologists and social historians developed the argument that the tradition of studying class consciousness via survey methods inevitably abstracted this phenomenon from social action and the context of class practices, with the result that the continuing salience of social class in American life was systematically underestimated. Using historical, ethnographic, and participant observation techniques, these critics attempted to identify and ground class consciousness in everyday cultural practices, shop-floor collective action, and local forms of social organization. Michael Burawoy's celebrated study of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (1979) is an early example of this genre, which had much in common with the understanding of class to be found in the work of the English historian E. P. Thompson, who viewed class consciousness and class formation as cultural expressions embodied in the development of neighbourhood solidarism, mutual aid societies, social clubs, class-specific forms of leisure, and so forth (see The Making of the English Working Class, 1968
). For an overview of this diverse and expanding literature see Rick Fantasia , ‘From Class Consciousness to Culture, Action, and Social Organization’, Annual Review of Sociology (1995)
.

class position In a study of class consciousness among clerical workers (The Blackcoated Worker, 1958; 2nd edn., 1989), the British sociologist David Lockwood introduced an influential theory of ‘class position’, which distinguished the three component factors of market situation (‘the economic position narrowly conceived, consisting of source and size of income, degree of job-security, and opportunity for upward occupational mobility’); work situation (‘the set of social relationships in which the individual is involved at work by virtue of his position in the division of labour’); and, finally, status situation (‘the position of the individual in the hierarchy of prestige in the society at large’). It was the particular combination of experiences originating in these three spheres which, according to Lockwood, constituted the principal determinants of class consciousness among clerks. See also GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME.

class In social science, a section of society sharing similar socio-economic status. A person's class is usually determined by the income and wealth of their parents. A class society is a system based on the unequal distribution of wealth. In Marxism, class is defined in relation to the means of production (land, capital). The bourgeoisie own the means of production and the proletariat provide the labour. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels asserted that “the history of all society up to now is the history of class strugglerdquo;.

class division of persons or things. XVII. Prob. first in gen. use in the sense ‘division of pupils in a school’, and immed. — L. classis each of the six ancient divisions of the Roman people, body of citizens under arms, spec. fleet. Cf. (O)F. classe.
Hence class vb. XVIII. So classification XVIII ( — F.), whence classify XVIII.

Class

a rank or position of society; a division into units in a school or college; in the United States, those students who enter college the same year; a number of persons with similar qualities or skills grouped together; a range of items or things graded according to quality.

class, social class See BOURGEOISIE; CLASS AWARENESS; CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS; CLASS IMAGERY; CLASS INTEREST; CLASS POSITION; CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS; MARX, KARL; MIDDLE CLASS; PETITE BOURGEOISIE; PROLETARIAT; UNDERCLASS; WORKING CLASS.

class A category used in the classification of organisms that consists of similar or closely related orders. Similar classes are grouped into a phylum. Examples include Mammalia (mammals), Aves (birds), and Dicotyledoneae (dicots).

class A facility introduced in the programming language SIMULA. The class provides a form of abstract data type. It is also the basis of the concept of object that underlies Smalltalk and other object-oriented languages.

class In biology, part of the classification of living organisms, ranking above order class and below phylum. The class names for plants all end in ‘idae’, but animal class names are more varied.

class, see classification. Also, a class of ships or yachts are ones all built to the same design.

class in taxonomy: see classification .

class •arse, baas, brass, carse, class, coup de grâce, farce, glass, grass, Grasse, impasse, Kars, kick-ass, kvass, Laplace, Maas, Madras, outclass, pass, sparse, stained glass, surpass, upper class, volte-face •badass • lardass • sandglass •eyeglass, spyglass •wine glass • tooth glass • subclass •hourglass •fibreglass (US fiberglass) • underclass •masterclass • weather glass • bypass •underpass • wheatgrass • ryegrass •knotgrass • sawgrass • bluegrass •goosegrass • smart-arse