SOCIAL CLASS

Charles Tilly

Social class has attracted a great deal of attention, not to mention bitter dispute, from social historians. Social class refers to categorical differences among clusters of persons when material inequality constitutes (a) the categorical boundaries or (b) a likely cause of differences among bounded categories. Social class by no means exhausts human inequality. People have often organized large material inequalities around gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, and locality, none of which qualify ipso facto as class. People also vary individually with respect to strength, size, health, volatility, and a number of other traits that affect the quality of their lives. Social class may shape or interact with these other forms of inequality, but it remains analytically distinct from them. If the idea of social class has deeply informed the study of social history, it has also generated profound disagreement among specialists in the field. As they disagree about class, analysts actually struggle over the salience, durability, impact, and categorical clustering of inequality in human life.

As they should, historians generally exclude a wide variety of human inequalities (for example, by gender, height, or religion) from social class. Beyond that minimum agreement, however, they range from considering class differences as fundamental in social life at one extreme, to denying the very existence of social classes at the other. Anyone who uses class terms to describe unequal positions or social relations makes a further theoretical commitment. Class terminology implies that the positions or relations in question cluster into categories having some degree of internal coherence and some connection with each other. Precisely the extent, nature, origins, and consequences of such coherence and connection remain controversial and the objects of extensive historical investigation.

HISTORY OF CLASS TERMINOLOGY AND CLASS ANALYSIS

Contending ideas of class circulated long before social history formed as a distinctive discipline. The Latin word classis referred to a vertical division of the Roman population according to property and entered English with that meaning during the sixteenth century. Over the next century the English word "class" applied increasingly to categories of the population; but "development of class in its modern social sense, with relatively fixed names for particular classes (lower class, middle class, upper class, working class and so on) belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840, which is also the period of the Industrial Revolution and its decisive reorganization of society" (Williams, 1976, p. 51). By that time writers as diverse as James Madison, Hannah More, and James Mill freely used class terms to describe the world they saw around them. In the 1840s, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began treating social classes as fundamental divisions under capitalism, they incorporated common usage into their innovative theory.

So doing, however, Marx and Engels opened an enduring split between self-consciously materialist analysts of social processes and others who generally recognized differences among social classes but rejected marxist explanations of those differences. In the Marx-Engels account, material relations within every mode of production generated their own class divisions. As Marx later put the general point:

It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. (Marx, 1972, p. 791)

Accordingly marxists have commonly analyzed history in terms of distinct modes of production: primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, and more (Marx, 1964). Each mode, in this analysis, centers on a characteristically different opposition of classes. Marx devoted the great bulk of his attention to capitalism. Although capitalism harbored multiple classes, he argued, its central processes of exploitation generated increasing division between capitalists, who owned the means of industrial production, and wage workers or proletarians, whose effort fructified those means. That divided material infrastructure, furthermore, shaped the basic institutions of social life, including government, education, and kinship. So ran the strict marxist view.

COMPETING NOTIONS OF CLASS

Since Marx's day social historians have repeatedly polarized for and against this relational and production-based conception of social class. Some dispute its exact application to particular historical settings, some forward alternative conceptions of class, and some deny the very applicability of class categories to the situations they study. A characteristic (if slightly disingenuous) statement comes from the great student of France's Old Regime hierarchies, Roland Mousnier:

Despite beginning with the conviction that social classes were indeed what Marxists mean by that term, that classes had started to exist when societies emerged from so-called primitive communism, and that class struggle was if not the whole of history at least one of its most important elements, my research with my students on societies and institutions brought us to quite different conclusions. We are now persuaded the Marxist conception of social class only applies to certain kinds of societies and has been improperly extrapolated. If we want a general term for the great variety of social hierarchies, we will do better to use the expression social stratum, which designates a universal concept, a family. (Mousnier, 1976, p. 5)

As elements of a social stratum, Mousnier names:

• distinctive part in the social division of labor
• distinctive way of carrying out that effort
• disposition of effort by members of at least one other stratum
• mentality and style of life
• means of existence resulting from its social role

For location within a system of production, Mousnier thus substitutes function in society at large. His conception has several powerful consequences. It displaces the origins of inequality from relations of production to societal function; considers societies to consist of two or more unequal strata, differentiated vertically, in virtual isolation from each other; and excludes the lowest social level (who dispose of no one else's effort) from designation as a distinct stratum.

Mousnier goes on to argue that Old Regime France was a society of orders (honor-differentiated strata), not of classes, and that French classes formed only with nineteenth-century industrialization. He explains that change not as a direct consequence of alterations in productive relations but as an effect of shifting values: "social classes are a type of strata existing in societies where value judgments place the production of material goods and the creation of wealth at the top of the scale of social functions, in a market economy where capitalist relations of production prevail" (Mousnier, 1976, p. 7). Mousnier distinguishes five "scales" of stratification, legal, social status, economic, power, and ideological, whose relative prominence varies from society to society and age to age (Mousnier, 1973, pp. 15–18). Thus, in the widespread view represented by Mousnier, different societies value different attributes and rank people accordingly (compare with Barber, 1957). Class therefore represents no more than a special case of a general phenomenon.

Despite its concessions to other principles of differentiation, the Mousnier-style analysis clearly presents class as a particular variety of position, individual or collective, in a hierarchy of prestige, wealth, or power. Standard marxist views just as clearly differ. They identify class as collective location within a system of production. They stress inequality but deny hierarchy in the sense of orderly (and especially consented) precedence. Over the long run these two positions have contended for dominance within social history, yet other social historians have dissented from the two majority positions. Some (e.g., Parkin, 1979) have emphasized shared relations to consumption markets, while others (e.g., Stedman Jones, 1983) have based their conceptions of class on shared consciousness or culture. Later we shall return to these alternative views, as well as to denials that class exists at all.

Before World War II, most western European social historians used class terms loosely and descriptively, attributing distinctive characteristics to upper classes, middle classes, workers, peasants, and other categories but considering problems of class formation, class consciousness, and class distinction peripheral to their enterprise. In economic and political history, however, questions of class then loomed larger. There the causes and consequences of poverty, the origins of capitalism, and the changing power of landholders, merchants, and manufacturers became sites of acute controversy. Within each controversy at least one party attributed significance to changing class relations. In Great Britain, for example, left-leaning historians, such as R. H. Tawney, Sidney Webb, and Beatrice Webb, placed class firmly on the historical agenda. Soviet historians and non-Soviet marxists also organized much of their analyses around class categories. But it took the populist social history of the 1950s and thereafter to make social class an inescapable preoccupation.

Marxist and materialist historians outside the Soviet Union—for instance, Jürgen Kuczynski, Eric Hobsbawm, and Georges Lefebvre—led the way. They highlighted social class from two different angles: as a general framework for historical analysis and as an object of intense empirical study. The general framework featured the rise, fall, transformation, and conflict of different classes, with marxist ideas of social development its leading impetus. Social historians, however, spent relatively little effort on general theories. They concentrated especially on the empirical study of social classes, more often working classes than any others.

COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL CLASS

1. Hierarchical position. A social class is a rank or stratum defined by recognized and effective differences in prestige, wealth, or power. For example, lords, merchants, and serfs are seen as public actors rather than legal categories. This implies vertical divisions crossing large populations and resting on widespread agreement, however grudging, and promotes social history of changing rank orders, their public representations, and their implications for styles of life.
2. Market connection. A social class is a population segment defined by distinctive relation to land, labor, and commodity markets. For example, gentry, farmers, merchants, artisans, and tenants are seen as owners, producers, and especially consumers. This implies extensive but differentiated markets with significant impacts on the well-being of their participants and promotes social history of material culture, property, and consumption.
3. Consciousness and culture. A social class is a set of people who regard each other as social equals or share a distinctive body of understandings, representations, and practices. For example, the aristocracy contrasts with the bourgeoisie as a community and style of life. This implies well-defined boundaries, extensive connections, and mutual recognition within boundaries and promotes social history of changing understandings, representations, and practices.
4. Location in production. A social class designates occupants of a large but distinctive position within a system of material production. For example, capitalists versus proletarians are defined by control of capital versus dependence on the sale of labor power. This implies broad categorical divisions across whole systems of production and the significant impact of productive position on overall welfare. It promotes social history linking politics and social life to the changing organization of production and investigating shifts in forms and degrees of inequality.
5. Chimera. In a particular setting or in general, social class is an illusion or at best a mistaken description of inequalities better characterized in other ways. For example, "middle class" is viewed as a broad idea about the population majority in contemporary industrial countries. This implies fragmentation of differences in material inequality and promotes social history of ideas about identity and inequality as well as investigation of nonclass bases of inequality.

A kind of populism swept over the field: enthusiasm for writing social history from the bottom up, for recovering and broadcasting the authentic vox populi. Populism became even more prevalent as it coupled with the campus mobilizations of the 1960s. Many students then moved into history with the hope of giving voice to the powerless and of identifying historical precedents for current struggles. Some took up analyses of popular political mobilization and rebellion, others reconstruction of workers' daily lives, still others detailed investigation of social inequality and mobility. For a while it looked as though social history and sociology would form an indissoluble alliance. Sociology beckoned as the only social science discipline prepared to take class seriously.

Then E. P. Thompson almost single-handedly changed the field's direction. No doubt a number of social historians had already become uneasy about the formalism, structural reductionism, and methodological conventionality of the sociology they saw invading their enterprise. They were already ripe for a more literary, ethnographic, and interpretive account of social life, especially one that offered a larger place to consciousness than most sociologists allowed. Still, in 1963 Thompson roared onto the terrain like an invading army. Descending from the heights of literary criticism and biography, he daringly attacked on two fronts, machine-gunning mechanistic marxism even as he cannonaded conservative condescension. At least for England from the 1780s to the 1830s, he swept the field, persuading a wide range of readers that something he called the "making" of a working class occurred through a sustained series of struggles and convincing the rest that they now had a new, seductive leftist thesis to combat.

Thompson scored his fellow marxists for structural reductionism—for assuming that one can read out people's motives and states of consciousness from their location within relations of production. The formation of class consciousness, he countered, is an arduous, contingent, struggle-ridden process whose vagaries historians must retrace in detail. Class, he objected, does not spring directly from economic position but emerges from dynamic interaction with other people. Class is a relation, not an attribute. Class consciousness, he further claimed, draws crucial parts of its content from available political understandings—in the case of eighteenth-century English plebeians, notably beliefs in the rights of freeborn Englishmen and in the priority of the moral economy over political economy. Thus he drew marxist class analysis toward a much more phenomenological, ethnographic, cultural, and idea-oriented approach than the one previously employed by most of its practitioners.

A fierce, witty polemicist, Thompson directed equal scorn toward liberal and conservative analysts of working-class experience. He attacked two recurrent errors: (1) reduction of workers' actions to ill-considered impulses generated by sudden hardship or rapid social displacement and (2) assumption that the working classes lacked sophisticated understandings of politics and economics and therefore responded gullibly to the exhortations of demagogues. To rebut these views he poured ample ingenuity and energy into uncovering popular ideas concerning rights and obligations; tracing connections among participants in such activities as machine breaking; and matching the slogans, symbols, avenging actions, testimonies, and demands of working-class activists with doctrines in the literary record.

With a literary historian's panache, Thompson mustered an extraordinary range of evidence for his thesis, drawing connections between political philosophy and popular culture, enormously broadening conceptions of relevant texts, and giving popular utterances and crowd actions a literary standing they had rarely achieved before. His victorious vision of class formation in England inspired numerous historians of other Western countries to search for parallel constructions in their own territories and periods, so much so that the phrase "making of the working class" acquired the immortality of a cliché.

Thompson never quite escaped the shadow of teleology. The idea of working class formation—of "making"—easily attaches to the teleological notion that every mode of production assigns a destiny to each of its constitutive classes (Katznelson and Zolberg, 1986). The big historical questions thus become how and to what degree each class actually fulfills its destiny. By stressing consciousness, Thompson forwarded the idea that class formation depends critically on the developing mutual awareness of people who already occupy a distinctive location within the system of production. Indeed Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) stops in 1832, by which time, in his account, popular struggles during the 1790s had prepared working-class consciousness, postwar conflict had sharpened it, worker mobilization around reform had accelerated it, and the exclusion of most workers from benefits of the 1832 Reform Act had embittered it. But the full denouement still lay ahead, presumably in Chartism and its aftermath.

So great a challenge could not go unanswered. Sociologically inclined critics (e.g., Calhoun, 1981) objected that Thompson misread the organizational bases of popular collective action, while critics who were speeding toward discourse and consciousness even faster than Thompson himself had (e.g., Jones, 1983) rejected Thompson's concessions to structural determinism. Still others (e.g., Anna Clark, 1995; Frader and Rose, 1996) complained that Thompson had produced an excessively masculine account of class formation, quite neglecting the crucial place of women and gender relations in the process. Since Thompson, historical studies of class have frequently formed their battle lines along epistemological and ontological divides: explanation versus interpretation, realism versus idealism, practical action versus consciousness, sociology versus anthropology.

The works of Patrick Joyce and James Vernon on nineteenth-century Britain are representative. Both sought refuge from marxist realism in linguistic analysis, Joyce fretfully and Vernon with shrill bravado. Each proposed his own interpretation of English popular culture and its creeds as an alternative to the Thompsonian history of class formation. In the baker's dozen of essays that fill his Visions of the People (1991), Joyce explored a wide variety of materials recording popular discourse, popular literature, slogans, demands, theater, dialect, and much more, asking to what extent their uses set workers off from other people and to what degree they conveyed direct awareness of class difference as formative experience and source of grievances. Joyce concentrated on Lancashire and the North between 1848 and 1914, eventually concluding with great unease that something like widely shared class consciousness began to emerge not in Thompson's 1790s but toward World War I.

Vernon's Politics and the People (1993), for its part, took on all of England from 1815 to 1867 but used as recurrent points of reference close studies of public politics in Boston, Lewes, South Devon, Tower Hamlets, and Oldham. Although his announced period overlapped the one examined by Thompson, Vernon did not aim his empirical investigation at Thompson's account of political action between 1815 and 1832. Instead he looked chiefly at post-Reform politics to document his claim that for ordinary English people the public sphere, far from opening to democratic participation, actually narrowed dramatically between 1832 and 1867.

Despite avoiding direct confrontation with Thompson's treatment of 1780 to 1832, Joyce and Vernon both sought self-consciously to displace Thompsonian analysis of class formation. They did so by means of three maneuvers: denial that economic experience shapes class consciousness; insistence on the variety of economic and social experience; and embedding of all meaningful experience in language. In so doing each made two further moves he did not quite recognize and therefore did not bother to defend. The first was to adopt radical individualism, an assumption that the only significant historical events or causes consist of mental states and their alterations. The second was to doubt the intersubjective verifiability of statements about social life. Together the two moves brought them close to solipsism, the doctrine denying the possibility of any knowledge beyond that of the knower's own individual experience.

Vernon and Joyce thereby avoided questions of agency: who does what to whom and with what effects. Their occultation of agency separates them from conventional historical narrative, in which limited numbers of well-defined, motivated actors, situated in specific times and places, express their ideas and impulses in visible actions that produce discernible consequences. Those consequences typically are the objects of explanation. Conventional narrative entails not only claims to reasonably reliable knowledge of actors, motives, ideas, impulses, actions, and consequences but also (a) postulation of actors and action as more or less self-contained and (b) imputation of cause and effect within the narrative sequence. Solipsism makes most of these elements difficult, and denial of agency renders them impossible.

Vernon and Joyce also ruled out alternative modes of social-scientific analysis, which require less access to other people's consciousness as well as allowing actors, actions, and environment to interact continuously but demand strong conceptions of causal connection (Bunge, 1996; Hedström and Swedberg, 1998). Either solipsism or denial of agency suffices to command rejection of these forms of social analysis. In short the Joyce-Vernon philosophical position obliterates any possibility of historical explanation. It also undermines any grounds they might propose for accepting the validity of their interpretations in preference to Thompson's or anyone else's. At this point social history reaches an impasse ( Joyce, 1995). Yet the rich, sensitive deployment of textual analysis in the Joyce and Vernon studies underlines the strong desirability of uncovering firmer philosophical ground. The challenge is to incorporate the explanation of texts, discourse, and changing consciousness into the ongoing work of social history.

SOCIAL-HISTORICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF CLASS

Despite many dud grenades hurled across the lines in both directions, fortunately debate did not much deter historians' concrete investigations of social class. Hobsbawm, for example, continued to turn out major historical syntheses pivoting on broadly marxist class analyses. In collaboration with social scientists, drawn from many disciplines besides sociology, social historians have actually advanced the program of explanation (see Mohr and Franzosi, 1997; Monkkonen, 1994; Morawska and Spohn, 1994). Two developments look particularly promising: (1) systematic study of class-relevant language and texts in the context of their production, transmission, and political deployment and (2) introduction of network models and metaphors into the analysis of class relations. Both, as it happens, draw some of their inspiration from Thompson, the first from Thompson's broad treatment of texts and the second from Thompson's insistence on class as a social relation rather than an individual attribute.

An excellent example of linguistic analysis in political context comes from Marc Steinberg's treatment of dialogue among workers, employers, and public authorities in Britain's Spitalfields, Ashton-Stalybridge, and elsewhere during the early nineteenth century. Steinberg showed how available forms of discourse channeled interaction among the parties to struggle but also changed as a consequence of that interaction, indeed in the very course of struggle. Responding more or less directly to the work of Joyce, Vernon, and other linguistically sensitive historians, Steinberg concluded:

I have argued that despite recent critiques from the linguistic turn, theories of historical class formation and of political process and resource mobilization provide essential windows on fundamental processes that have been and continue to be part of great transformations in the modern world. I have also maintained, however, that the critics raise compelling issues concerning the centrality of discourse in class formation and collective action. Although rejecting the linguistic turn's alternatives, I have proposed revising Thompson's perspective on class and the political process/resource-mobilization model of contentious action with discourse as a critical intervening process. Rather than choose between material and discursive analyses, we need to conjoin the explanatory powers that each perspective offers. (Steinberg, 1999, p. 229)

Such inquiries promise to narrow the epistemological and ontological fissures that have riven studies of class.

The network approach to social relations receives prominent attention in Don Kalb's study of class transformations in North Brabant, Netherlands, between 1850 and 1950. Both the dispersed shoemaking industry and the large-scale manufacturing of the Philips Corporation attracted Kalb's relentless curiosity as he combined material from collective biography, administrative records, governmental correspondence, and interviews of survivors. Kalb characterized his approach as anthropological:

My case studies of class formation in subregions of industrializing Brabant tend to illustrate that an anthropological interest in popular culture, discourse, and everyday life can, and indeed should, be wedded to social power and social process. This is so not only because power, change, and inequality are central aspects of social life that ought not be missed by any serious analyst of human affairs (that is, unless he or she accepts political irrelevance), but more importantly because class-oriented analysis can reveal crucial ambiguities, contradictions, divisions, limits, obstacles, and dynamics of culture that cannot be uncovered in other ways. In short, by consciously elaborating an approach based on a materialist idea of class with the intention to study social power and social process, I claim a more penetrating methodology for explaining and understanding culture. (Kalb, 1997, p. 2)

This historical anthropology of class rests not only on examination of utterances and representations but also on reconstruction of the dynamic social relations that constitute class. Both the linguistic and the network versions of recent class analysis retain an emphasis on relations of production but make unprecedented efforts to integrate dialogue, daily practice, and social ties as more than straightforward expressions of productive organization.

DEFINING SOCIAL CLASS

What then is social class? As the foregoing discussion suggests, social historians have generally adopted one of five answers to the question.

1. Social class consists of position, individual or collective, in a hierarchy of prestige, wealth, or power or is a special case of such hierarchical differentiation.
2. Social class describes a connection, individual or collective, to markets that produces significant differences in quality of life.
3. Social class resides in mutual consciousness or shared culture among sets of persons who collectively regard themselves, however justly or unjustly, as superior or inferior to others.
4. Social class is or depends on collective location within a system of production.
5. Social class is an illusion or at best a mistaken description of inequalities better characterized in other ways, for example, as variable individual competence, ethnic culture, or occupational specialization.

Except for the last, these competing views do not entirely exclude each other. But they imply different priorities. Marxist social historians have, for example, sometimes combined the first four in the argument that collective location within a system of production determines both hierarchical position and relation to consumption markets while shaping mutual consciousness and culture. Thus arguing, marxists give priority to production. Other social historians assign priority to hierarchical location, consumption markets, or consciousness. In line with the first or the fifth alternative, still others deny the validity of class as description or explanation of social behavior for particular situations or even for history in general. Inequalities, even hierarchies, may exist, doubters declare, but they do not constitute social classes. When social historians do speak of social class, however, they generally stress one of the first four competing conceptions. Hierarchical and productivist ideas (alternatives one and four) have predominated in social history over the long run, but the other three positions have all competed at times.

What is at stake in this competition? Social historians who treat class as hierarchical position often take vertical division as part of a natural order given by custom, historical accretion, prevailing values, or social function. Relations among classes therefore play little or no part in their explanations of class differences. Changes in class structure, according to such a view, result from long-term, incremental alterations in values, mentalities, population composition, or societal type. In functional versions of the argument, agrarian societies simply require one type of hierarchy, industrial societies another.

Social historians who emphasize connections to markets as bases of class distinctions generally consider classes to be recent social creations. Their existence depends on the commodification of capital, land, goods, and services. This commodification can create distinct classes when two conditions converge: (1) segmented access to markets and (2) variable property rights according to the kinds of goods in question or the status of their possessors.

Emphasizing relations to labor and commodity markets, Max Weber made a famous statement of this view:

Those who have no property but who offer services are differentiated just as much according to their kinds of services as according to the way in which they make use of these services, in a continuous or discontinuous relation to a recipient. But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual's fate. Class situation is, in this sense, ultimately market situation. The effect of naked possession per se, which among cattle breeders gives the non-owning slave or serf into the power of the cattle owner, is only a fore-runner of real "class" formation. (Weber, 1968, vol. 2, p. 928)

Weber explicitly distinguished class divisions from status group and party divisions, which he regarded as more crucial where labor and commodity markets were ill developed. Other historians have added markets for land to Weber's labor and commodity markets. In such a perspective class and class conflict become salient under certain special conditions, notably the predominance of land, labor, and commodity markets, but classes do not exist everywhere, need not form regular hierarchies, and often coexist with crosscutting divisions by status and party.

To focus class analysis on mutual consciousness and shared culture articulates well the widespread idea that social categories matter only to the extent that people recognize and participate in them. The idea appeals to an odd assortment of social historians. They include not only methodological individualists (who regard rationally deliberated choices as prime historical motors), but also phenomenologists (who regard individual consciousness as the seat and source of human action) and theorists of mentalities (who regard society-wide shifts of shared understandings as driving forces in history). In any of these lines of thought, classes only exist if, when, and because many people come to conceive of them as existing. Consequently, for them processes of class formation and transformation operate chiefly within the cognitive sphere.

Social class as collective location within a system of production introduces relations among members of different categories much more explicitly into class analysis. The view has two contrasting versions, one aligned approximately with classical and neoclassical economics, the other identified broadly with marxism. The economistic version considers that markets link holders of different sorts of capital, including human capital, and apportion rewards among them according to the current value of their capital to productive processes. Although Adam Smith argued explicitly that organizational and power differentials affected what different classes (for example, merchants and landless laborers) could gain from market relations, within those limits he laid down the doctrine of returns proportionate to productive contributions. Smith's successors have portrayed production as built around freely contracted bargains among holders of different varieties and quantities of capital. Classes therefore correspond to divisions with respect to capital. Following this understanding, extensive historical research has gone into changes in living standards and in material inequality. Increasing inequality in income, wealth, and welfare becomes the evidence of increasing class differentiation (Kaelble, 1983).

Marxists counter neoclassical explanations of class differences with an interpretation of productive relations, not as freely contracted bargains but as exercises of coercion among inherently unequal parties. The organization of production, in this view, lays the bases of class divisions; those divisions arise from unequal interaction among categories of participants in productive processes and generally involve struggle. For either the economistic or the marxist view, then, change in the organization of production generates change in class structure.

Finally, some claim that social class is a chimera. In fact the rejection of class analysis for particular situations or for history in general arises from several rather different groups of social historians. Antimarxists (including former marxists) sometimes take the fully revolutionary proletariat of Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848) as their standard for existence of a class, then set out to prove that workers' consciousness or behavior fell short of the standard. Joyce and Vernon undertook just such proofs. (This form of argument provides an ironic counterpoint to the frequent marxist practice of explaining workers' failure to act collectively against their exploiters by the absence of conditions for class-conscious action sketched in the Manifesto.) Market enthusiasts sometimes argue that competition among unequally competent individuals produces differential rewards but nothing like social classes. Students of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and other forms of categorical inequality often claim that what other historians see as class differences actually result from discrimination in these other arenas.

The choice among conceptions of class does not merely concern the words historians apply to the same phenomena. It involves profoundly different understandings of how history works. Competing views of fundamental social processes are at stake. Advocates of hierarchical models, for example, commit to the existence of an overarching social system or culture that generates, sustains, and transforms the relevant hierarchies. Interpreters of class as grounded in production relations, however, inevitably attribute coherence and power to material production. Such contrasting worldviews have implications far outside the workings of class.

COMPETING DEFINITIONS OF CLASS AND SOCIAL HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

To appreciate those implications, it is helpful to examine a trio of historical phenomena whose explanation depends in part on social class. In these cases the choice of one class conception or another should make a difference to the explanation itself. Beginning with obvious cases, the examination then moves to increasingly subtle manifestations of social class: first the development of capitalism, then popular political contention, finally demographic change.

Development of capitalism. All accounts of capitalist development recognize changing configurations of work and capital. They differ greatly, however, in the significance attributed to social classes. Views of class as hierarchical position generally treat class formation as a significant by-product, but not a significant cause, of capitalist development. Causes lie elsewhere: in a society's inevitable differentiation, in alterations of collective mentalities, or perhaps in the diffusion of new technologies. Market-connection accounts of class leave somewhat more space for class formation as a cause of capitalist development, since changes in the character of merchants and of consumers both affect the organization and extent of markets. Nevertheless, market-connection models generally portray their major relations with class formation the other way around: however it occurs, expansion of labor and commodity markets differentiates participants into distinct categories—social classes—disposing of contrasting bundles of goods, services, work opportunities, and life chances.

To argue that social class resides in mutual consciousness or shared culture does not necessarily rule out origins of class consciousness or class culture in hierarchy or market position. Yet it does predispose its advocates to favor ideological and cultural explanations of capitalism as well. (In fact Weber stressed the influence of a Protestant ethic on the development of European capitalism while laying out one of the most coherent market-connection conceptions of class.) Such explanations abound; they often pivot on the assertion that western European culture predisposed its beneficiaries to competitive enterprise, an assertion that typically gives great weight to capitalist entrepreneurs in the creation of capitalism as a whole.

Analysis of class as collective location within a system of production likewise typically gives great weight to capitalist entrepreneurs but in relation, often in struggle, with other social classes. In such analyses class relations constitute major elements of any productive system, class interactions alter production, and class structure responds sensitively to shifts in the logic of production. Historians who regard class as a chimera are predisposed to explain the development of capitalism in terms of autonomous, impersonal forces, such as science, technology, the market, or changing mentalities. Thus different conceptions of social class imply distinct approaches to explanations of capitalist development.

Popular political contention. Popular political contention means ordinary people collectively making claims bearing on other people's interests when some government is either the object of those claims or a significant third party to them. Popular political contention includes collective retribution for moral offenders, intervillage fights, invasions of enclosed fields, deliberate disruptions of public ceremonies, market conflicts, strikes, and rebellions, but it also includes the demonstrations, public meetings, petition drives, and electoral campaigns that nineteenth-century Europeans eventually lumped together as social movements (Tilly and Tilly, 1981). Popular political contention does not involve social classes by definition. Indeed nonclass categories, such as religion, gender, ethnicity, and locality, have often figured in European contention. Nevertheless, differing conceptions of class have significant implications for the description and explanation of popular political contention.

Strong marxist views of class imply one of two positions. Either (1) all popular contention rests at bottom on class interests and class conflict, in which case apparent nonclass action stems from false consciousness or indirect effects of class formation; or (2) in the long run class interests and class conflict supersede other forms of division, hence other bases of contention. In the first position, excavating nationalism or religious conflict with sufficient care will eventually expose its foundation in class structure. In the second position, a variety of solidarities, interests, and conflicts arise in the short run, but, within any given mode of production, class polarization eventually prevails. Indeed that polarization eventually produces a crisis in which popular contention propels transition from one mode of production to another.

A competing version of social class as collective location within a system of production depends on non-marxist economics. If, as this second version implies, classes form around market-mediated divisions with respect to capital, popular political contention may still have a class basis. But two rather different scenarios apply. One is the case of a class having shared interests in the production of some collective good, such as protection of its kind of capital from predation or erosion, redistribution of returns from capital, or monopoly control of some market. In this case standard collective action problems arise.

A second scenario, however, involves collective reactions to consequences of occupying a common economic location, as when a labor market segment shrinks (handloom weavers are a famous European example), crucial commodities suddenly become more expensive (bread prices are a famous European example), or a productive resource disappears (enclosures of common lands are a famous European example). In contrast to the first scenario, economic analysts commonly regard the contention involved in such cases as irrational, since it resists the inexorable long-run logic of the market and of returns to capital. Nevertheless, both scenarios call up economistic accounts of class action that differ significantly from marxist accounts.

Obviously conceptions of social class as hierarchy, as market connection, as shared culture, or as illusion point to still other characterizations of popular political contention. Social theorists in the styles of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto have, for example, repeatedly spun out hierarchical theories of class in which political struggles emerge chiefly from efforts of subordinates to displace currently ruling classes. Shared-culture theorists of class, in contrast, typically take several steps beyond Thompson by making political tradition, altered consciousness, and response to evocative symbols central to popular action (see Herzog, 1998; Hunt, 1984; Sewell, 1980). Clearly, competing conceptions of social class lead analysts of popular political contention in significantly different directions.

Demographic change. Each approach to class has distinctive implications for the study of basic demographic processes, especially categorical differences in birth, death, marriage, sickness, mobility, and growth or decline (for a general introduction to the literature, see Willigan and Lynch, 1982). Demographers commonly think in terms of populations and imagine that categories are little more than convenient identifiers for subpopulations likely to have more homogeneous experiences than the population as a whole (Desrosières, 1998). The relevant categories then include age, sex, religion, ethnicity, and nationality, but they also include representations of class, such as income, occupation, or estimated social standing.

Social historians who study population processes more often take the categories seriously. They do so on either or both of two grounds: that the sheer existence of known unequal categories is a social fact with consequences for social behavior, including demographic behavior; and that the categories actually represent inequalities in social ties, culture, and quality of life more or less accurately.

Still, our competing answers to the question "What is social class?" lead to different expectations concerning categorical differences and their explanations. Class as hierarchical position lends itself readily to the expectation of continuous differences in behavior as a function of proximity to elite values and resources. Explanations of such differences may well involve varieties of upbringing and education, but they also can emphasize social connections or access to resources and opportunities. Discontinuous distributions and well-marked boundaries—for example, in types of illness or in contraceptive behavior—then suggest discontinuous distributions of upbringing, connections, resources, and opportunities.

If social classes consist of population segments defined by distinctive relations to land, labor, and commodity markets, continuous distributions appear less likely as causes or effects of inequality. Segmented labor markets, for example, bundle interpersonal connections, identities, mobility opportunities, and a wide variety of resources (Tilly, 1998, chapter 5). Observing such effects, analysts can plausibly explain categorical differences in mortality and age at marriage by delineating clustered and market-driven differences in exposure to risks and opportunities.

Consciousness and culture? If a social class is a set of people who regard each other as social equals and share a distinctive body of understandings, representations, and practices, certainly their sharing should affect their demographic behavior and change. In fact two different kinds classes of effects should occur, the first resulting from the existence of a boundary around equals and the second resulting from shared culture. The boundary presumably limits sexual relations, marriage, kinship, mutual aid, and information flows, all of which affect birth, death, marriage, sickness, mobility, and growth or decline. The shared culture presumably includes such demographically crucial matters as contraception, abortion, child care, diet, health care, migration, and sexual practices. These are not mere speculations; many students of population change have bet heavily on class differences in consciousness and culture for their explanations (e.g., Gillis, Tilly, and Levine, 1992; Poppel, 1992).

However, about as many have adopted conceptions of class as depending chiefly on location in production. Once again a distinction arises between advocates of neoclassical and marxist approaches to the problem. For neoclassically inclined analysts, class effects on demographic change occur through the formation of similar conditions for individual decision making that affects fertility, mortality, mobility, and other demographic processes (see Goldstone, 1986; Wrigley, 1987). Although marxist reasoning sometimes overlaps with neoclassical explanation in this regard, marxists in general assign more importance to social relations at production sites. In the best social history, to be sure, those production sites include households and neighborhoods as well as shops and factories (see Hanagan, 1989; Levine, 1984, 1987).

Some students of demographic change, however, declare class a chimera. A case in point is Simon Szreter's study of fertility change in Great Britain from 1860 to 1940. Szreter organized interpretation of his voluminous data around an attack on the (common) idea of nationwide fertility differentials and declines corresponding to class differences and responding to diffusion of ideas and knowledge downward through the class hierarchy. He argued instead (a) that rising costs of raising children moved couples toward increasingly effective prevention of conception by means of sexual abstinence and coitus interruptus, (b) that this happened not class by class but according to small-scale variations among occupations and localities, and (c) that changing gender relations mattered far more than any effects one could reasonably attribute to class. Szreter summed up his findings:

The evidence presented here suggests that falling fertility among this part of the nation was far from a process graded by neat and identifiable, nationally applicable status or social class patterns. It was the relatively massive, and highly localised variations between communities, especially in the degree to which their labour markets were sexually segregated and divided, which may well largely account for occupational fertility differentials during this period of falling fertilities. This was something which was integrally linked to the history of local industrial relations and work practices in each of these places. (Szreter, 1996, p. 364)

Szreter rejected class interpretations in the name of local and occupational particularism. In that respect he joined the sort of attack on Thompsonian class analysis mounted by Joyce and Vernon.

Examination of ideas about capitalism's development, popular collective action, and demographic change establishes that competing conceptions of class do not matter for themselves alone. They lead to different explanations of major social phenomena. The same sort of demonstration applies to historical studies of welfare, of migration, of family structure, of electoral politics, or of revolution. The conclusion would be the same: social historians contend about social class because the experiences those words point to are fundamental and because competing conceptions of social class entail conflicts about the very nature of social processes.

The debate need not remain, however, a battle of philosophical premises. Social historians are a skeptical, practical, empirical lot. The synthesis among production-based, relational, and discursive approaches to social class promises to give them superior guidance in actually explaining the processes of change and conflict they so painstakingly document.

See alsoMarxism and Radical History (volume 1);Capitalism and Commercialization; The Industrial Revolutions (volume 2);Collective Action (volume 3); and other articles in this section.

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