THE EMERGENCE OF CLASS

"The owl of Minerva," Hegel wrote, "flies at twilight." In no area of sociology is

the appositeness of this maxim more striking than with respect to the study of
social class. Only after the historic and essential bases of social class in
European society had become tenuous and uncer-tain, had become threatened by forces
such as political centralization, citizenship, and mass education-forces which
would, in the long run, make class the weakest of all the traditional social
unities under the modern regime did the study of social stratification burst forth
in full. brilliance. Central to sociology's interest in stratification is its sharp
dis-tinction, from Tocqueville on, between social class and social status.
Interest in social hierarchy is not, to be sure, peculiar to the nineteenth
century. The far-reaching idea of "the great chain of being" that had, from Plato
down to the modern Enlightenment, fascinated European philosophers, suffusing
metaphysics, biology, and cosmography, could nor but have included the notion of a
social chain of being: one that stretched from the lowly peasant through
intermediate ranks and stations to monarch or emperor. References to "ranks,"
"orders," and
"degrees" are strung out continuously in social and moral thought from the late
Middle Ages on. A great deal of the social philosophy of Thomas Aquinas concerns
the hierarchy of the organic community. Aside from a few religiously inspired
equalitarian groups spawned for the most part by the Reformation-the chiliastic,
millennial, and apocalyptic-it is hard to find moral philosophers prior to the mid-
seventeenth century who would not have concurred with Shakespeare's words: "Take
but degree away, untune that string, and hark! what discord follows; each thing
meets in mere oppugnancy." Elizabethan dramatists and philosophical STATUS 175
essayists were literally obsessed by rank, estate, and station and their absolute
necessity in the social order.'
When we come to Hobbes, however, in the middle of the seventeenth century, we find
a suspicion of both aristocracy and the middle class; a suspicion founded on
Hobbes's distrust of all intermediate social bodies in the monolithic structure of
his Leviathan.? In natural-law theory as a whole in the century there is, with the
one remarkable exception of Althusius, an exclusion of social class and rank from
systematic con-sideration. The hostility that natural-law theorists manifested for
the most part toward guilds and other corporations was extended, in theory at
least, to aristocracy. Unlike such essential concepts as those of indi-vidual,
state, and contract, the concept of social class had little if any theoretical
role. Althusius, as I have suggested, is a major exception. His vision of society
had as much room in it for the ordered gradations of social hierarchy as for
community and corporation. But he stands alone.
With the onset of the Enlightenment, we see a sharp rise in criticism of
traditional hierarchy-proceeding from the philosophes' general distaste for
everything feudal in origin-and also in analytical interest in stratification.
Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, for all its polemical overtones,
contains a remarkable account of social stratification set within a developmental
perspective and pivoted upon private property. Some of the Scottish moral
philosophers-Hume, Ferguson, Adam Smith, and especially John Millars-gave searching
attention to stratification. The latter's Observations Concerning the Distinction
of Ranks in Society is a masterpiece of historico-ethnographic description and
analysis.
But all of this is nothing compared to the intensity and comprehensiveness of
treatments of stratification to be observed after the forces of revolutionary
democracy and industrialism had gotten well under way in the nineteenth century.
Conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike made the concept of social class
fundamental to their writings. Such indeed was the rascination that the word
"class" came to exert on the minds of intellectuals that John Stuart Mill was led
to write in 1834: "They revolve in their eternal circle of landlords, capitalists
and laborers, until they seem to think of the distinction of society into those
three classes as if it were one of God's ordinances, not man's, and as little under
human control as the division of day or night. Scarcely any one of them seems to
have said to himself as a subject of inquiry, what changes the relations of those
classes to one another are likely to undergo in the progress of society." a Mill's
words applied to the economists, certainly, but not to 176 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF
SOCIOLOGY
the sociologists. As I shall emphasize in this chapter, it was of the very essence
of sociology to be concerned with the future of class under the operation of
historical forces. Indeed, in this concern lay the basis of the central conflict
among sociologists in the century, with Tocqueville at one point on the continuum
and Marx at the other.
The concept of social class, in distinction from the earlier concepts of hierarchy,
is late eighteenth century. As Asa Briggs has written: "The concept of social
'class' with all its attendant terminology was a product of the large-scale
economic and social changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. ... There was no dearth of social conflicts in pre-industrial society,
but they were not conceived of at the time in straight class terms. The change in
nomenclature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected a
basic change not only in men's ways of viewing society but in society itself." 4
Why did social class seem so paramount a reality to many minds when, as we have
seen, processes of individualization, leveling, and fragmentation were endemic in
the transition to the modern regime? Putting the question differently, why did the
age-old conception of the continuity of hierarchy in society, the notion of a chain
of being, now become supplanted by presentiments of discontinuity, even of
conflict, among classes? The answer lies, in considerable part, in what Ostrogorski
has called the "new species of subordination" that arose in the industrial world.
"When manufacturing took the place of domestic labour, direct intercourse between
the owners of factories and the shifting masses of workmen became impossible;
henceforth their only points of contact were work and wages, governed by the stern
law of supply and demand; they became anonymous abstractions one to the other; they
came together and parted without seeing each other. ... They now belonged to
different strata of society ... marked by distinctions which varied according to
the income of their members, and each distinction constituted a new line of
demarcation and separation." & Whether these new strata were simply levels-—tenuous
and evanescent in the long run—or the hard social classes Marx thought them to be
is not here the point. What is important is the sudden appearance of the
terminology of class, a terminology that was to remain vital in social science for
a full century.
It is even possible, as Raymond Williams has shown, to date the successive
appearances of the new terms of class. "It is only at the end of the eighteenth
century that the modern structure of class, in its social sense, begins to be built
up. First comes lower classes to join lower orders, which appears earlier in the
eighteenth century. Then, in the 1790s we STATUS 177
get higher classes; middle classes and middling classes follow at once; working
classes in about 1815; upper classes in the 1820s. Class preju-dice, class
legislation, class consciousness, class conflict and class war follow. ..." e THE
MODEL OF CLASS
Something must be said of the significant role held by the English landed class in
the minds of those who, from the late eighteenth century on, were concerned with
the probable shape of stratification in the new society that was forming around
industry. Nothing quite like the English landed class existed on the Continent, a
fact emphasized by the references to it that we find in French and German writings
throughout the nineteenth century. That this class was, in one way or another, a
model for all those in England whose intellectual roots lay in Burke's admiration
for it is hardly strange. It also excited the respect of Hegel, Tocque-ville, and
Taine. I am more interested, however, in its conceptual function in providing the
pattern, so to speak, of what writers were to take as the substance of true class,
in whatever context. I believe it was the English landed class above any other that
became the analytical model for what, it was widely assumed, would be fulfilled,
mutatis mutandis, in the new economy of capitalism. The English landed class was, I
think we are justified in saying, the known from which many students of
stratification
—including Marx—mapped their way into the new unknown of industrial society. A good
many radicals and conservatives alike foresaw the industrial bourgeoisie as the
successor of the landed class, like it in struc-ture, status, and power, differing
only in economic context.
The relevance of the English landed class to both radical and conservative theories
lies in its detachment from any formal system of political law and from any
apparent external force. In France and on the Continent in general social classes
of the older order had been more nearly in the nature of estates, bounded,
reinforced, and maintained by laws of the realm. Not so in England. Despite the
powerful role that this class played in political affairs, it was not a creature of
law and nothing in the English constitution pertained to it.
There was, first, its economic unity founded largely upon landed property. It would
be wrong to say that no other forms of property were recognized, but it is fair to
note that men who made their fortunes in commerce and business did not usually gain
recognition from this class 178 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
until they had acquired land and based their existence upon it. From generation to
generation landed property tended to remain in the same family hands.
Equally notable was the political unity of the class. Economic ownership and
political power coalesced almost perfectly. This was to be seen not merely in the
overwhelming number of Parliamentary seats that went to members of the landed class
and in the astonishing degree of consensus that reigned among them, but in the
monopoly they held of administrative functions in local and county government. "The
great un-paid," as they were to be called by a later historian, is an apt term.
Without formal compensation of any kind, without indeed any position in the law of
the land, they performed throughout England the essential tasks of administration,
including much of the dispensing of justice. It was the generally high sense of
responsibility with which this class operated at local levels- coupled with the
absence of the kind of aggressive and independent legal profession that France had
produced-that for long restrained a true bureaucracy in England and made of this
class a model for all conservatives.
There was little if any element of caste. No legal boundaries existed to mark
classes and no restrictions of a legal sort prevented others from participating. We
know that occasionally men did rise from below to attain influential places in
goverment and society. But they were rare for, although the landed class was not
closed, openings were few and could close with extraordinary speed. Overwhelmingly,
national politics, local administration, justice, and service in the commissioned
areas of the armed forces were the functions of this one, socially homogeneous
class.
So too was there a high degree of convergence of the various attributes of social
status. Except for the handful of intellectuals largely concentrated in London, the
only people of education were members of this class, and both the public schools
and the two great universities were shaped in purpose and result by landed class
needs. The norms of what constituted an educated man were universally understood.
Language, including accent, could identify a man in a moment as belonging to this
class. All were of the Established Church, most of the higher clergy were
themselves products of the landed group, and even when they weren't, their
loyalties to it were strong.
Over the whole structure towered the governing conception of the gentleman. Hard to
define in abstract terms, perhaps, the reality of the gentleman was nevertheless as
unmistakable and as universal as that of STATUS 179
the land itself. In dress, opinion, taste, and conviction the landed gentleman set
the life style of all that was invested with prestige and power. It was the
pervasive image of the gentleman that had so much to do with maintaining the
solidarity of this class, with shoring up its political and economic strength, and
with making its behavior and desires so universal in England of that day. All of
this we know from the countless letters and diaries of the age.
We should note that this class was functional in sociological re-spects. Between
the social attributes of prestige and the realities of economic and political power
there was an almost perfect convergence, leading to a degree of solidarity and
self-awareness that could hardly have been exceeded. Criteria of class were clear,
easily identifiable, and substantially the same everywhere in England. Knowledge of
a family's standing with respect to any one of the criteria was sufficient to place
that family fairly accurately with respect to other criteria. Finally, there was
stability of this convergence of attributes from one generation to another. In sum,
if it was the social norm of the gentleman that surmounted the structure, it was
the near monopoly of political power and its deep roots in property that provided
the foundations.
The rugged strength of this landed class may be inferred from the extent to which
its purely cultural properties— intellectual interests, edu-cation, mode of speech,
life style in general-
-remained evocative in Eng-
land after its real economic and political roots had been cut by economic change
and political reform. Nowhere else in Europe, much less in the United States, has
the cultural reality of an upper class remained so vivid, s. continuously
influential in all spheres of government and soci-ety, as in England. Despite
profound changes in political structure and in the character of wealth, despite the
broadening of the educational base, an upper-class culture remains even today
significant beyond anything known elsewhere in Western society. And no matter what
the diversity of economic channels through which this culture flows today—
industrial, governmental, and other—its historical source is the landed class I
have just described. THE CHALLENGE TO CLASS
From our point of view, however, the essential significance of this class in the
nineteenth century was conceptual. It became, as I have sug-gested, a kind of ideal
type, a theoretical model, of what substantive 180 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
social class is and what its political and economic power in society might be. This
class was, of course, pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal in character. It had a great
deal more to do with the stability of the new economic and political orders than
spokesmen of either of the latter were willing to admit. They, chiefly the
economists— classical and socialist alike—con-tented themselves with describing the
new classes that capitalism was supposedly ushering in: industrial owners and
workers. Given the abstract mode of economic analysis and the assumption of an
autonomous, self-operating economic order, the reinforcing and often vital
influence of the landed class was rarely perceived. Nor were the intricate inter-
weavings of landed and industrial wealth in both old and new families.
Economists, for the most part, were prisoners of categories bequeathed by Smith and
Ricardo.
But to the sociologically minded the outlines of the old, landed class were
distinct and brilliant. And a large number of minds sought in the new economic
strata of capitalism the same convergence of political, economic, and cultural
elements that were so plain in pre-capitalist classes of aristocracy and peasantry.
Why, it was asked, should not the future of capitalism reveal the development of an
upper and a lower class within its own economic structure that would be as
politically and socially distinct, as culturally pervasive, as anything to be found
in the pre-capitalist order? It was in reply to this question that the two major
types of evaluation of European stratification were predicated.
The major controversy in the study of stratification, at least among the
sociologists, was not that of social class versus equalitarianism. It was the
subtler and theoretically more fundamental one of social class versus social
status: of a view of the new society resting upon the assumed existence of solid,
substantive social class opposed to a view resting upon the assumption of the
erosion of class and its replacement by fluctuant, mobile, status groups and by
status-seeking individuals.
We may put the question in this fashion: Was the new society that was being ushered
in, a society founded upon citizen, entrepreneur, and technologist, a society based
on the imperious, if uncertain and often misled, will of the masses, dominated by
new structures of administrative power and flooded by new forms of wealth, driven
by novel and incessant pressures for educational, religious, and social equality;
was this society to be, as had been all previous forms of society, organized
primarily in terms of class layers, each holding the same union of economic,
intellectual, educational, and political properties that had characterized social
ranks in the old order? Or, in sharp contrast, could the acids of STATUS 181
modernity be seen working in as destructive a fashion upon the bases of social
class—in any viable sense of that word—as they were upon village community,
extended family, and the whole network of moral-cultural relations that had also
been born in the pre-capitalist, pre-democratic, pre-rationalist age?
Answers to these questions form a major aspect of sociology in the century and they
are, of course, closely related to treatments of other elements of the social and
political order. That is, how one approached the problems of community and
authority foretold much of how he would approach the problem of stratification.
Bias was as vivid here as it was in all other major issues in the century. On the
one hand were those who argued that social, political, and economic inequalities in
the new, emerging society could be as accurately described in terms of social class
as the inequalities that had been contained in the old order. In the bour-geoisie,
exponents of this view—radicals for the most part-could see, or foresee, the same
kind of formidable unity of power, wealth, and status in the industrial world that
had characterized the landed aristocracy for hundreds of years in Europe and was
even yet a force to be reckoned with. Marx became, as we know, the pre-eminent
representative of this body of interpretation, and the impress of his ideas is with
us still.
On the other hand, and in sharp contrast, were those who, from the very beginning,
saw no more likelihood of substantive social class forming within the new order
than they did genuine community, of which class, in their eyes, was a notable type.
The fragmentation of the old order, resulting in the release of long-pent-up
elements of wealth and power and status, would lead, it was argued, to a scrambling
of social categories, to an individualization of stratification that would result
in the ascendancy not of class but of social status-which is at once more mobile,
individually autonomous, and diversified than class. Tocqueville is the major
representative of this view.
I do not wish to overdraw the contrast. It is not black and white.
None of the sociologists was oblivious to class in one degree or another.
Even Tocqueville could refer to the "class" of manufacturers and to an economic
power wielded by manufacturers that seemed to him fraught with danger to democracy.
But, as we shall see, Tocqueville uses the term class in so denatured a sense that
it is left merely as a kind of level, at best an interest group; not a social
stratum characterized by the kind of solidification of political, economic, and
social elements that had characterized the structure of the landed aristocracy. 182
THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
The difference between political conservatives and radicals on the nature and
reality of social class is a kind of anagram of the existential and the utopian.
Conservatives, beginning with Burke, said, in effect, that while social class
should be one of the supports of a truly stable and free society, it was all too
likely that the combined effect of political centralization, social atomization,
new types of wealth, and the transfer of the center of political gravity from rural
to urban areas would in fact destroy the substance of social class, reduce it to
mass rubble. No single element is more central to the social philosophies of Burke,
Coleridge, and Carlyle in England, to Bonald, Maistre, and Balzac in France, and to
Haller and Hegel in Germany than that of social hierarchy. And, equally, nothing is
more common to these writers than the assumption that economic and political
modernism was rapidly destroying the contexts of hierarchy. Auguste Comte was
powerfully affected by conservative veneration for hierarchy, and we find in his
early writings sharp criticism of the egalitarian doctrines of Enlightenment and
Revolution and, in his Positive Polity, rigorous prescription for the organization
of the Positivist utopia in terms of distinct social classes.
Radical thinkers, on the other hand, took the position that while the extermination
of social hierarchy had the highest priority in social action and while equality
was, even over freedom, the sovereign value in their axiology, the harsh facts were
that capitalist society would be as class-structured, as class-dominated, and
class-oriented as was any preceding stage of man's social development. And
political democracy would not, could not, affect this. From William Cobbett in
England, through Proudhon in France, to Marx in Germany, radical doctrine made the
reality of social class in capitalism fundamental to its thinking.
These two ideological positions are, so to speak, magnetic poles in the study of
stratification in the nineteenth century. Among the sociolo gists, Tocqueville is
as perfectly expressive of the one as Marx is of the other, and what eventually
emerges chiefly in Weber-as the dominant sociological view of stratification is
best seen as a resultant of the two forces represented by Tocqueville and Marx. If
for a long time the Marxian view exerted the greater influence, it was never
absolute (except among Marxists), and more recently it is clear that Tocqueville's
perspective has become ascendant. 300 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF CLASS-MARX
In Germany the situation is strikingly different. It would be hard to And any
social concept possessed of more pivotal importance after 1849 than the concept of
class. Even when, as with Tönnies and Weber, we find major modifications of the
class perspective, class and the whole terminology of stratification retain a
degree of importance lacking in French thought. Marx is, of course, the prime
source of all this.
In Marx we find no picture of social class pulverized by the forces of modernism,
of power passing from social hierarchy to political masses, of frenzied competition
for status. What Marx gives us is a view of modern society resting upon the solid
reality of class, a reality in which power, wealth, and status are as class-based
as they were under feudalism.
He might have been directing the following words at Tocqueville: "The modern
bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the
class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps, into two great. classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and
proletar-iat." B7
Some students of Marx's thought have suggested that beneath his vision of the two
great classes in capitalism-bourgeoisie and proletariat
—lies the model of ancient master and slave classes. But I do not think we need go
back so far in history. We need look only to the classes of landed gentry and
peasant that were still solid structures in Marx's time to find his model. As I
have suggested, English landed society alone was sufficient in this respect. Did it
not prove that there could be united in a single social class the attributes of
political power, wealth, social status, and all the controlling forces for a
society reflected in culture, life style, education, and religion? Was it not
obvious that what had existed for centuries in the landed aristocracy was now
forming in an industrial aris-tocracy, the bourgeoisie, to survive until the
gathering forces of revolution would destroy this class, just as revolutions had
destroyed all preceding forms of class in history? Only this time there would be
left not still another sovereign class but, for the first time in history, the
structure of a society without any classes at all.
Marx's fascination with the bourgeoisie is at the heart of his theory. STATUS 201
No spokesman for Manchester could have given us more laudatory words on this class
than Marx wrote in the early pages of the Manifesto:
"The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together." 68 The development of scientific technology, the command of nature's
resources, the erasure of local and national bound-aries, the rise of cities, the
spread of communications, the creation of a world market, and the rise of common
people into political areas previously governed by nobility alone—all of this, Marx
tells us, is the work of a single social class: the bourgeoisie.
In Marx's praise there is of course special and revolutionary intent.
All that he gives in revolutionary importance to the bourgeoisie in the making of
modern Europe he transfers to the proletariat for the making of future Europe: the
socialist, classless society which must, Marx argued, evolve as inexorably as each
preceding stage of society had evolved.
What the bourgeoisie has done in our era to dislocate the landed aristoc-racy, the
proletariat must do eventually, through operation of identical dialectical-
historical forces, to the bourgeoisie. For the present, however, the health of the
bourgeoisie is absolutely essential to the embryonic development of the
proletariat. On this point Marxian "science" rested squarely.
"The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by the
development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does the proletariat
gain that extensive national existence which can raise its revolution to a national
one and does itself create the modern means of production, which become just so
many means of its revolutionary emancipation. Only its rule tears up the material
roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian
revolution is possible." &8 Elsewhere, as in the Communist Manifesto and The German
Ideology, Marx would emphasize the international aspect of the development of the
proletariat. "Empirically, communism is possible only as the act of the dominant
peoples 'all at once,' or simultaneously, which presupposes the universal
development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. ...
The proletariat can thus exist only world historically, just as communism, its
movement, can only have a 'world-historical' existence." & But the bourgeoisie is
absolutely fundamental to the development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is
for Marx what democracy is for Tocqueville: the cause and the shape of all that is
central in the modern regime.
In stark contrast to Tocqueville, Marx sees ever more extreme in-202 THE UNIT-IDEAS
OF SOCIOLOGY
equality as the dominant social characteristic of the time. Tocqueville had
stressed the bland and uniformitarian aspects of modernism: aspects that would
eventually sterilize all significant social and political differ-ences. Marx,
however, saw social and political differences among men increasing and, given the
structural contradictions of capitalism, made ever more revolutionary in
implication. Where Tocqueville saw at best economic levels in industrial society,
Marx saw classes and, between them, inevitable and relentless struggle.
Class struggle is for Marx a principle, the principle, of history: comparable in
scope and force to Comte's law of three stages, to Tocqueville's political
centralization, to Weber's rationalization. Class struggle is the most fundamental
social manifestation of the dialectic in history; it is the "efficient cause" of
the movement of society from one stage to another. The modern emergence of the
bourgeoisie is the conse quence of "a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and ex-change." The bourgeoisie has, from dialectical necessity, become
a revolutionary force, the most revolutionary indeed in all history. Wherever it
has got the upper hand, Marx tells us in one of his most celebrated state-ments, it
has put an end to all forms of relationship-kinship, religious, professional,
personal—founded on assertedly moral or personal values.« Only "cash-payment" is
left.
Let us look more closely at the Marxian conception of the nature of class. Despite
the fact that social class is the very basis of Marxian soci-ology, and despite the
abundance of general references to social class-most notably to the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat—a clear, analytical conception of social class is not easy to
derive from a reading of Marx.
The one place in his works where it would appear that a genuine sociological
analysis is under way—at the very end of the third volume of Capital-the discussion
comes to a quick and uncertain ending. We shall return to this momentarily. It is
first necessary to deal with the larger picture of social class that Marx gives us.
We begin with the centrality of work.
For Marx, what man does economically is the single most important and determining
thing about his life. The type of work he performs, his position in the larger
system of production in society, and the differential rewards he receives for his
work—these are the essential elements on which a sociology of class must be built.
Given the crucial role of work in man's life, it follows that the position man
holds in society's stratification of work and rewards is bound to affect not only
the degree of power he possesses but also his social status and even his
personality. STATUS 203
"The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, continued to
serve as the leading thread in my studies may be briefy summed up as follows: In
the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that
are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of
production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society-the real foundation, on which rise legal and political
superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social conscious-ness.
The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the
social, political, and spiritual processes of life." ®2
This principle is as relevant to the societies of the ancient world as it is to
those of the present. It was the system of production that divided ancient
economies into master and slave, feudal society into noble and serf, and modern
capitalism into capitalist and worker. Social movement in history is always caused
by revolution in which the struggle between classes is the central element. This
struggle is invariably the consequence of a contradiction that develops between
"material forces of production" (technology) and "existing relations of production"
(the social classes).
"From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into
their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is
more or less rapidly transformed. ... In broad outlines we can designate the
Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as
so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois
relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of
production-an-tagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one
arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same
time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeris society create the
material conditions for the solution of that antagonist." 83
The relation between social class and the rest of society is therefore direct and
unalterable. So is the relation between social class and ideas, which form, in
their totality, an ideology—that is, a set of mental repre-sentations-of class
position. "The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e.,
the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its
dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production
at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production,
so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production
204 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
are in general subject to it. The dominant ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas, and thus of the relationships which make one class
the ruling one; they are consequently the ideas of its dominance." es
What has been true in the historical past is equally true of the bourgeois-
dominated present. Literature, art, music, along with prevailing ideas of the good
society, morality, and even metaphysics, are all, in their dominant forms,
bourgeois representations. Only through revolution or, for the immediate future,
through disciplined awareness of the necessity of revolution and of identification
with the interests of the working class, is it possible for one to escape the total
cultural domination of the bourgeoisie. Hence the Marxian emphasis on the necessity
of developing a proletarian class interest and, with it, a proletarian mind,
culture, and world view.
The end of bourgeois culture and ideology is, of course, foredes-tined b, the laws
of historical development and of internal capitalist con-tradiction: Just as each
dominant class in past ages has sown the seeds of its own destruction, so has the
bourgeoisie. "Modern bourgeois society
•.. is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his spells. . . . The weap ons with which the
bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie
itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons,
the proletarians." 85
"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same
proportion as the proletariat, the modern working class, developed
—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work
only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell
themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and
are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market." &e
Out of the workingman's awareness of the class position which is forced upon him
will come, must come, collective proletarian awareness.
But for this to be accomplished, conflict with the bourgeoisie is an iron
necessity. Despite the importance of work and productive role in the formation of
class, it is the conflict of classes that exercises the major influence in Marx's
mind in fixing the class structure of loyalties and consciousness and in preventing
the fragmentation of class ties that would, apart from conflict, reduce class to a
tenuous "level." We must STATUS 205
stress this point. Too many contemporary students of class assume, with a naïveté
that Marx would scarcely relish, that while class conflict is a negligible feature
of contemporary social democracy, the lines and loyalties of class remain strong
nevertheless. Marx was much more sophisti-cated.
"The separate individuals form a class insofar as they have 10 carry on a common
battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other
as competitors. On the other hand, the class, in its turn, achieves an independent
existence over against the indi-viduals, so that the latter find their conditions
of existence pre-destined, and hence have their position in life and their personal
development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. This is the
same phenomenon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the division of
labor and can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor
itself." ®7
"Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country
into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common
situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital,
but not yet for itself. In this struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases,
this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The
interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against
class is a political strug-gle." 88
The context of Marx's view of class and of the functional necessity of conflict to
the preservation of class was formed in his earliest essays.
The following passage, published in 1844, is indicative of the relationship that
conscious conflict held to class consciousness in Marx's mind.
"For a popular revolution and the emancipation of a particular class of civil
society to coincide, for one class to represent the whole of society, another class
must concentrate in itself all the evils of society, a particular class must embody
and represent a general obstacle and limi-tation. A particular social sphere must
be regarded as the notorious crime of the whole society, so that emancipation from
this sphere appears as general emancipation. For one class to be the liberating
class par excellence, it is essential that another class should be openly the
oppressing class." Be
For Marx, consciousness is absolutely essential to true class. It is not enough
that a group of individuals occupy the same objective position in the economic
structure of society. There must be subjective awareness. It is the crucial
condition of class and of its historic role in 206 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
economic and political conflict. Marx's views on this may be inferred from his
negative comments on the peasantry in France. "The small peasants for a vast mass,
the members of which live in similar condi-tions, but without entering into
manifold relations with one another.
Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them
into mutual intercourse ... Insofar as millions of families live under economic
conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their
culture from those of other classes, and put them into hostile contrast to the
latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among
these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no
national union, and no political organization, they do not form a class." 70
Marx never discounted the importance of creating, or helping to create, a sense of
class. This was a part of the mission of Communists, of those who would be the
vanguard of the proletariat's emergence on the world stage. His analytical system
can never be really separated from his vivid sense of man's making history. But the
fact remains that in Marx's mind there had to be the substance and logic of
industrialism and of the dialectic of history manifesting itself through iron
development, for this calculated vanguarding to be other than chimerical. For Marx,
social class is what the nation was to Hegel, the truest repository of history.
Social class is also, plainly, the dominating, even exclusive, category of the
Marxian explanation of the larger problem of social stratifi-cation. Is there in
Marx even a faint understanding of the kind of multiplicity of patterns of power,
economic strata, and status systems in nineteenth-century Europe that Tocqueville
had emphasized and that Weber and Simmel were to stress in their fundamental
departures from the Marxian view? Can one sense even a dim awareness in Marx of
class fragmentation, of status mobility, status invasion and status anxieties, the
study of which was to prove the really original contribution of European sociology
in the nineteenth century? Here and there, yes. A fragment in a letter, a
contemptuous parenthetical aside, a passing jeer at the landed class. But that is
all. What is central and constitutive for Marx in the society around him is not the
fragmentation but the congealing of class ties; not the dislocation of social
status and political power from economic class, but the ever firmer uniting of
these three elements.
There is rich irony in the fact that the reasons why social class has never
attained anything like the importance in capitalism that Marx ascribed to it flow
from the very factors citizenship, moral ideals of equality, religion, and
education-that Marx and his followers relegated STATUS 207
to subordinate and reflected status in history. For Marx all struggles within the
state, "the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and mon-archy, the struggle
for the franchise, etc. etc. are merely the illusory forms in which the real
struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another
..." 71 That nationalism, rather than class, would
achieve major appeal to the mass of twentieth-century workers; that the spread of
administrative bureaucracy into social and economic areas would itself negate
conflict and struggle in those areas; that reform movements, commonly engineered by
the bourgeoisie, in the areas of civil and social rights would become ascendant;
that, of all forces, education would prove to be the major force of sterilization;
that institutional rather than class conflicts would attain ascendancy in modern
history— conflict between state and economy, between religion and economy, and so
on--that the whole sway of economic forces might be drastically lessened from the
in fact historically rare importance these held in Marx's day: all of this was
inconceivable to Marx, as it has been, for the most part, to his followers.
But in a sense this is of negligible importance. For whatever its intellectual
omissions, Marxism became, before the nineteenth century was out, and remains even
today, the single most influential idea system in European history since the rise
of Christianity. There is irony here, too. For it was Marx's proud boast that he
had put ideas in their proper, subordinate, status and had shown that ideas were
but the pale reflection of the true dynamic forces of history. That his own ideas
should have become, almost independently of the forces they sought to describe,
among the key determinants of the modern world-in Asia, Africa, Latin America, as
well as in Europe—is a fact sufficient to mark their greatness measured in strictly
historical terms.
Even apart from their direct political and "religious" influence, Marxist ideas
have had almost undisputed influence in theoretical treatments of social
stratification until two or three decades ago. Vague though the Marxist formulation
of class was, it maintained a tenacious hold upon the study of stratification. Only
within the past few years has the Marxist model of society begun to be supplanted
in empirical studies by more imaginative, more flexible, and more relevant insights
—insights that have closer relation to the intuitions and impressions of Toc
queville than to what may be found in the Marxian canon. But it would take a rash
soul to say that the influence of Marx is altogether gone. He has been, so to
speak, the Ptolemy of the subject for a hundred years now, and although his writ is
no longer magisterial, no Copernicus has yet 208 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
come onto the field. We can say only that the reflection-neutralizing. attention-
narcotizing icons of Proletarian and Capitalist have, at long last, largely
vanished from the altars of Western intellectuals. In Schumpeter's vivid phrase,
Marxist rosaries are no longer being fingered.
Marx's influence on the theory of stratification has been strikingly like that of
Darwin on the ideas of evolution and natural selection. In each instance we have an
impressive shoring up of eighteenth-century ideas. The initial manner of statement
in both theories had the effect of persuading readers of an originality and break
with tradition that did not in fact exist. In precisely the same way that Darwin's
ideas are deeply rooted in eighteenth-century ideas of development, so Marx's ideas
on the nat re of social stratification are rooted in eighteenth-century analyses of
inequality. If Darwin had his Lyell, Marx had his Rousseau (vide the Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality). That Darwin's statement of continuous and cumulative
variation in genetic change has had a degree of acceptance in biology that Marx's
statement of dialectical change in society has not had in sociology is not the
point. The point is simply that the prestige of one in the study of biological
evolution has been precisely paralleled in the prestige of the other in the study
of social stratification, and that in each we are dealing with ideas that have deep
eighteenth-century roots.
CLASS AS GESELLSCHAFT-TÖNNIES
The conceptual unity that Marx gave to social class did not last even in Germany
except in the ranks of the politically committed. The discrepancies between the
modern order and the Marxist conception of that order were too great to be
contained in a theory that aspired to coalesce all the complex elements of power,
status, and wealth into one simple theory of social class.
What we see in the generation of sociological thought following Marx in Germany is
the gradual disengagement of each of these elements from the others and the
formation of new and more complex theories of stratification of which Max Weber's
was to prove the most notable and to be by far the most influential on subsequent
sociological thought. It was, however, Tönnies' fertile typology of Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft that prepared the way.
Whereas Marx with his progressive philosophy of history treated social class as
organizational and dynamic in modern society, it was in-CLASS VERSUS STATUS-WEBER
The distinction between political power, economic class, and social status is
brought to full theoretical explicitness in Weber's work. Weber sees contemporary
power in terms that are only incidentally connected with the role of classes and
social-status strata. For Weber it is bureaucracy on the one hand and the political
party on the other which have largely inherited the political component that once
lay in the hierarchical structure of estate or rank. With the increasing
assimilation of social conflicts in the framework of the constitutional state,
political parties have become the heirs, so to speak, of contending social forces
that in earlier times were not only outside the king's jurisdiction, but often
formidable rivals to it. Parties, Weber points out, began as personal followings in
the Middle Ages witness the Guelphs and the Ghibellines-and they largely retained
this character until the advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century. To a
considerable extent pre-nineteenth-century parties were also closely welded to
kinship great families and to aris-tocracy. ?8 Unlike the modern connotation of
party, which is of a kind of para-political organization, "officially unofficial,
unofficially official," the earlier form of party was, in fact, an offshoot of
traditional society, a part of the regular hierarchy. Thus, apart from the upper
classes in eighteenth-century England, parties in politics are scarcely imaginable.
The breakup of the old order changed this. Modern forms of party
"stand in sharp contrast to this idyllic state in which circles of notables and,
above all, members of Parliament rule. These modern forms are the children of
democracy, of mass franchise, of the necessity to woo and organize the masses, and
develop the utmost unity of direction and the strictest discipline." ? It is not
necessary to repeat what has already been said of Weber's theory of power. All I
wish to do here is emphasize the fact that in dealing with the problem of
stratification in modern soci-ety, the first, crucial step taken by Weber, thus
allying himself with Tocqueville rather than with Marx, was to deal with power as
something that must be distinguished from social class. Political parties, as Weber
put it in a memorable phrase, "live in a house of power." 80
Weber's second step follows both Tocqueville and Tönnies: it is the strict
limitation of class to the economic sphere. "The genuine place of
'classes' is within the economic order, the place of 'status groups' is within the
social order. ..." This does not mean hermetic insulation of three elements. In any
individual case, "parties may represent interests STATUS 213
determined through 'class situation' or 'status situation' and they may recruit
their following respectively from one or the other." But, Weber emphasizes, they
need be neither purely "class" nor purely "status" parties. They can have, and
modern politics shows them increasingly to have, a virtually independent status.81
For the separate elements of class, status, and party to have been released in
modern times, more than the negative force of fragmentation is involved. There must
also have been created through the centuries an environing structure in which these
are subordinate to the larger struc-ture. Most of us today would see this as a
result of the process of politicization in modern European history. Weber's word
for it is "societaliza-tion." Diversification has been possible only through "a
comprehensive societalization and especially a political framework of communal
action within which they operate." 82
If the political party has inherited most of the political functions of medieval
orders, it is class alone that today dominates in the economic sphere just as the
status group does in the social sphere. Class has, plainly, a very different
significance in Weber from anything to be found in Marx. "In our terminology
'classes' are not communities; they merely represent possible, and frequent, bases
of communal action. We may speak of a 'class' when (1) a number of people have in
common a specific causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this
component is represented exclusively by economic interest in the possession of
goods and opportunities of income and (3) is represented under the conditions of
the commodity or labor markets." 83
For Weber, class rests thus entirely on economic interest. Evea so, he recognized
that the concept of "class interest" is an ambiguous one:
"it is ambiguous as soon as one understands by it something other than the factual
direction of interests following with a certain probability from the class
situation for a certain 'average' of those people subjected to the class
situation." For, there are many and diverse interests and motivations that enter
the individual's mind in modern society, and since by its nature class is not
communal (which Weber defines as governed by the feeling of the actors that they
belong together), the rise of communal action from a common class situation is by
no means a certain or universal phenomenon. Neither, for that matter, is a societal
action (rationally motivated adjustment of interests).
"To treat 'class' conceptually as having the same value as 'commu-nity' leads to
distortion. That men in the same class situation regularly react in mass actions to
such tangible situations as economic ones in the 214 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
direction of those interests that are most adequate to their very number is an
important and, after all, simple fact for the understanding of historical events.
Above all, this fact must not lead to that kind of pseudoscientific operation with
the concepts of 'class' and 'class interests' so frequently found these days, and
which has found its most classic expression in the statement of a talented author,
that the individual may be in error concerning his interests but that the 'class'
is 'infallible' about its interests." 8t Such is Weber's reply to the Marxists!
"The great shift which has been going on continuously in the past, and up to our
times, may be summarized, although at the cost of some precision: the struggle in
which class situations are effective has progressively shifted from consumption
credit toward, first, competitive struggles in the commodity market and, then,
toward price wars on the labor market. The 'class struggles' of antiquity-to the
extent that they were genuine class struggles and not struggles between status
groups were initially carried on by indebted peasants, and perhaps also by artisans
threatened by debt bondage and struggling against urban creditors .. • The
propertyless of antiquity and of the Middle Ages protested against monopolies,
preemption, forestalling, and the withholding of goods from the market in order to
raise prices. Today the central issue is the determination of the prices of labor."
85
The third element in the modern stratification picture is the status group. This
is, for Weber, as distinct from class as each is from the political party. Between
the status group and a given social class there can be, of course, liaisons,
persistences of common interest, but the differences are nonetheless crucial.
"In contrast to classes, status groups are normally communities.
They are, however, often of an amorphous kind. In contrast to the purely
economically determined 'class situation' we wish to designate as
'status situation' every typical component of the life fate of men that is
determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor." 86
Tocqueville, it will be remembered, had made the idea of honor central in his
treatment of traditional European society, and his own history of the value was set
in the context of the decline of social hierarchy and the emergence of more
individualized, autonomous notions of honor in modern democracy. Weber is close to
Tocqueville, though he goes beyond him, looking to the ways in which honor and
desire for community have combined in modern society. He finds this in style of
life. STATUS 215
Status lines may be linked with those of class and party, but normally they are
not, and for the most part status "stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of
property." 7 The basis of the social system lies in the incorporation of honor and
in its rigorous identification with a life style. "In content, status honor is
normally expressed by the fact that above all else a specific style of life can be
expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle. Linked with this
expectation are restrictions on 'social intercourse (that is, intercourse which is
not subservient to economic or any other of business's 'functional' purposes).
These restrictions may confine normal marriages to within the status circle and may
lead to complete endogamous closure." 88
It is in the United States that status groups of the modern type are most clearly
to be seen. There the absence or disappearance of the kind of society still to be
seen in Europe leads to a stringent emphasis on fashion. Only certain
neighborhoods, certain modes of dress, certain kinds of cultural tastes will be
accepted at any given time in society.
There is strict submission to fashion. "This submission to fashion also exists
among men in America to a degree unknown in Germany. Such submission is considered
to be an indication of the fact that a given man pretends to qualify as a
gentleman. This submission decides, at least prima facie, that he will be treated
as such . . . The development of status is essentially a question of stratification
resting on usurpation.
Such usurpation is the normal origin of all status honor." 8o
Where status considerations have been realized to their full extent, status groups
harden into a closed caste. "Social distinctions are then guaranteed honor not
merely by conventions and laws but also by ritu-als." For the most part, however,
"caste" of this sort arises only where there are underlying differences which are
held to be ethnic. Dignity is closely related to honor. "Only with the negatively
privileged status groups does the 'sense of dignity' take a specific deviation. A
sense of dignity is the precipitation in individuals of social honor and of conten-
tional demands which a positively privileged status group raises for the deportment
of its members." so
Such is the picture of stratification in contemporary society that Weber presents.
I have stressed its close relation to Tocqueville's earlier analysis, but it would
be unjust if we did not emphasize two important aspects of Weber that are not to be
found in Tocqueville. The first is methodological. What Weber does is convert the
concepts of power, class, and status into a framework of analysis flexible enough
to be used as a comparative perspective in the study of all societies. In
Tocqueville 216 THE UNIT-IDEAS OF SOCIOLOGY
the three elements are not only largely implicit, but they are confined to his
empirical observation of the United States and Western Europe. They are, thus, more
nearly historical than sociological in temper. The second element follows from the
first. The concept of status is employed by Weber on a world-wide scale and is made
the point of departure of study of specific institutions: particularly religion.
Thus, for Weber, the concept of status group becomes an indispensable means of
analyzing ancient Judaism, the formation of caste in India, and the rise of the
Junkers in modern Prussia. Status becomes a tool of analysis, an explicit framework
of observation, through which matters as diverse as religion, econ-omy, education,
and political behavior are illuminated. From Weber more than any other sociologist
has come contemporary sociology's varied use of status and status group in the
analysis of human behavior.
Down until the nineteen-thirties. Marx's monolithic and unwieldy vision of class
tended to dominate the study of stratification. No doubt what proved necessary to
end the spell of Marx in modern sociology was not so much the accumulation of new
data as the political spectacle of Sta-
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lin's Russia and consequent ideological disaffection. But the result, however
gained, was the same: the gradual supersession of "class" by
G
"status" as the key concept in sociological studies of stratification. Today, as a
sociological concept, class is dead.
THE AUTONOMIZATION OF STATUS-SIMMEL
There are two quite distinct principles of social organization posited by Simmel
which, taken together, go far to explain, or to provide a theoretical setting for,
the view of status that had its origin in Tocqueville and received its most
creative statement in Weber. The first of these principles is autonomization; the
second is objectification. That the referent of each of these principles is by no
means limited by Simmel to the sphere of stratification does not affect the
relevance of both to the concept of status in modern society.
Autonomization, for Simmel, is a basic principle of social develop-ment, one
through which the disengagement or separation of elements previously united is
achieved in an institution or a social form. Such elements "become autonomous in
the sense that they are no longer inseparable from the objects which they formed
and thereby made available to our purposes. They come to play freely in themselves
and for their own sake; they produce or make use of materials that exclusively
serve their own operation or realization." ®I Prime examples of "autonomiza-