[The death of class]

Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class. London: Sage, 1996, 173 pp., paper.

What would sociology lose if it abandoned the concept of class? Nothing, according to Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, and by dropping an anachronistic preoccupation, sociology would have much to gain. Nearly forty years after Robert Nisbet's obituary for class, they set out to bury it theoretically, empirically, and ideologically.

The authors begin by positioning themselves in the debates of the 1970s and 1980s, Defining class in terms of property and market relations, they distinguish class theory (represented primarily by neo-Marxists such as Poulantzas and Wright) from class analysis (mainly Weber and Goldthorpe). The former, they assert, is a monocausal theory that treats class as "the fundamental explanatory concept," and embraces the axioms of economism (the main divisions in societies are economic), groupness (classes are real, bounded groups), behavioral and cultural consequences (for identity and actions outside the sphere of production), and transformational capacity (classes as collective actors). Class analysis relaxes these assumptions and uses class as only "a privileged explanatory variable" (p. 5). Their expressed intention is to disprove even the relaxed assumptions of class analysis, and ipso facto, to show that class theory is untenable. In fact, they criticize strong class...