Class: History of the Concept
Jan Pakulski, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
The history of the concept of class the evolution of its meaning and deployment is divided into ve periods: (1) the
prehistory of class; (2) the formative period of the early nineteenth century, when the concept enters the stage in its Marxist
formulations; (3) the period of spread and diversication at the beginning of the twentieth century; (4) the period of
ascendancy and proliferation in the second half of the twentieth century; and, nally, (5) the period of decomposition and
eclipse starting during the last decades of the twentieth century and lasting till now.
Although class is a very old concept, with its roots in ancient
Rome, its contemporary meanings were shaped and reshaped
in the context of modern debates triggered by the Industrial
Revolution in Europe and its worldwide consequences. In this
context, and in the context of Marxist theory and ideology, class
started to denote large economically based and polarized
(opposed, antagonistic) social groupings, marking the main
lines of structured social inequality, conict, and change in
industrializing societies. The concept subsequently evolved
together with the changing patterns of social inequality and
contestation, as well as the theoretical debates that pitched
class against its main concepts-competitors: estate, rank, race,
nation(ality), occupational group, stratum, elite-mass, etc. Its
popularity had initially increased, and then gradually faded,
especially following the declining popularity of Marxism the
theoretical cradle in which the concept of class was embedded
and the collapse of communism at the end of the twentieth
century. It is therefore convenient to see the concept of class as
(1) theoretically embedded; (2) diverse in its meaning; (3)
ideologically implicated, and therefore always politically con-
tested; and (4) historical, that is, evolving together with major
social upheavals and their theoretical accounts. It is convenient
to divide the history of the concept its changing meaning and
deployment into four periods:
1. the prehistory of class the early period when the concept
acquired its hierarchical-classicatory meaning;
2. the formative period of the early nineteenth century, when
the concept entered the stage in its original (but diverse)
Marxist formulations;
3. the period of reshaping at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, when the concept was reworked within
and outside Marxism;
4. the period of ascendancy and proliferation, when class
entered popular discourses and vocabularies but in an
increasingly vague and diverse form; and, nally,
5. the period of further diversication, decomposition, and
eclipse that started during the last decades of the twentieth
century and continues at present.
Prehistory of Class
The earliest references to class in its hierarchical-
classicatory meaning are found in ancient Rome, where
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 3
the summons to military service, called classis, ranked citizens
into hierarchical divisions (subsequently called classes)
according to the value of property and expected military
equipment and strength. The landless proletarii were excluded
from the service they formed the equivalent of ancient
underclass. The propertied (land-owning) citizens those
with the right to carry arms and vote formed seven classes,
ranging from armed infantry warrior to those who could afford
entire cavalry detachments (Cowell, 1962). This early usage
shaped the meaning of the term that became a synonym of
a social rank, a position in social hierarchy, a location in the
stratication system typically based on wealth and income.
While in the medieval and early modern period the term class
was seldom used overshadowed by more traditional notions,
such as estates and orders it was, nevertheless, mentioned
as a generic classicatory concept, an equivalent of social rank
or stratum. The modern usage, pioneered by Karl Marx,
oscillates between this generic meaning of the main polar
social division, and a more specic meaning, as a type of social
division emerging together with modern capitalism. The latter
the modern class based on capital ownership and employ-
ment status was contrasted with the old social divisions
(estate or order) based on the ownership of land and the
accompanied status (honor). While the old estates were closed
and ascriptive, the new class divisions were seen as open and
achievement based. It was the rst estate the despised,
privileged, and exclusive aristocracy that provoked the ire of
French revolutionaries.
Class in Marxism
The contemporary meaning of class arose in the context of the
Marxist theory of social conict and change formulated in
response to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Western
Europe or, strictly speaking, to the disruptive social conse-
quences of the Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944). Modern
sociologists, political scientists, social historians, and anthro-
pologists made class a central focus of their analysis, mainly
under the inuence of rising and evolving Marxism. Class was
the central concept in Marxist historical materialism, referring
to three theoretically interrelated analytic entities, usually
organized into polar (opposed) pairs: (1) the major structural
socioeconomic categories differing in their relation to the key
means of production or the key productive resources (capital
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03071-3 745
746 Class: History of the Concept
vs labor) sometimes referred to by Marx as Klasse an sich; (2)
the large social groupings, the social carriers of the employ-
ment relations, forming on the basis of the main ownership/
employment relations (bourgeoisie vs proletariat); and nally
(3) the principal collective social actors: class-conscious,
solidarity, and organized social forces, formed in the process
of class struggles (ruling class vs challenging class) seen by
Marx as mature Klasse fr sich.
This multiplicity of meanings reected the Marxist theo-
retical aspiration to explain the socialhistorical evolution of
societies (the rules of motion of capitalist society), and
bridged the gap between structural accounts of social
hierarchy on the one hand, and the actor-centered accounts
of social change on the other. Class became a pivotal bridging
concept in this attempt. Social change always started,
according to Marx, within the socioeconomic base of society
(technology and know-how). It then articulated itself
in conicts between the main antagonistic classes. These
principal class conicts in the case of capitalism between the
bourgeoisie (capital ownersemployers) and the proletariat
(workersemployees) were gradually intensifying leading to
revolutionary changes.
In addition to major polar or antagonistic classes, Marx
also distinguished some intermediate and transient classes
bound to gradually disappear in the processes of class polari-
zation and struggle (Table 1). The class structure of modern
capitalism was thus seen not only as complex, but also as
gradually simplifying and polarizing. The most developed
capitalist societies were to be sharply divided into the mature
ruling class (bourgeoisie) that typically controlled and
managed the state, and the expanding, impoverished, and
dominated and also increasingly conscious, antagonistic,
and organized working class. This class polarization and
contestation was supposed to reach its peak when the domi-
nated class now class-conscious, politically organized, and
backed by bourgeois defectors took over power in a revolu-
tionary coup and completed a revolutionary reconstruction of
society. Note that in this evolutionaryrevolutionary cycle
major classes would change from nominal categories (Klasse an
sich) to real grouping and organized collective actors (Klasse fr
sich), while minor classes would wither away. Note also that the
concept of class was ideologically loaded because Marxism
claimed to be not just an explanatory theory but also and
principally a program for change, a radical recipe for social
reconstruction.
Table 1 The Marxist class scheme
Classes Trends
Bourgeoisie Growing in power and organization
but declining in number
Old dominant classes Declining in number and power
(aristocracies & nobilities)
New middle classes (ofcialdom) Growing in number but joining the
bourgeoisie
Old middle classes (petit bourgeois, Declining in number and power
craftsmen, peasant-farmers)
Working class Growing in number,
consciousness, and organization
Based on Pakulski, J., 2004. Globalising Inequalities. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the process of
conceptual refashioning of class started in the most industri-
alized European societies, with the realization that class
polarization was arrested, class radicalism gave way to
reformism, and the large middle classes are expanding, rather
than shrinking. Moreover, the old social divisions (estates)
had not disappeared, and the new social divisions along
ethnonational (and racial) lines started to dominate popular
identications.
Thus, the concept of class started to evolve in competition
with four main conceptual rivals. The rst one was estate or
order that described hierarchical social ranks: the nobility,
the clergy, and the residual third estate of peasants, traders,
and burghers, as well as a new status group of the intelli-
gentsia, emerging from the dclass nobility. Class also
competed with the increasingly popular concepts of people
(nation), referring to groups sharing a similar culture and
tradition, as well as races, referring to social categories with
physical similarities. Another conceptual competitor was an
equally polar pair of concepts, elites vs the masses, popular-
ized by mainly Italian critics of Marxism (Vilfredo Pareto,
Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels). This competition was
particularly intense in Europe. In the United States, where
ethnoracial divisions were more salient than socioeconomic
ones, class was overshadowed by race.
Class in the Twentieth Century
Class emerged as the dominant conceptdescriptor of social
inequality and conict at the beginning of the twentieth
century. There were three reasons for this triumphant ascen-
dancy: class was embedded in an increasingly popular (mainly
in Europe) Marxist theory of social conict and change; it
became part of an attractive ideology promising a happy
resolution of the main social question; and class mobilization
became a goal of both the radical social movements (socialist,
revolutionary), as well as the moderate social-reformist push
(social democrats). Moreover, the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia, an event that demonstrated the ideological mobilizing
potential of the class concept, enhanced the popularity of
class, especially among socialists.
This ascendancy, however, was accompanied by theoretical
and semantic diversication. As pointed out by Ossowski
(1963/1958), the meaning of class diverged within three
theoreticalpolitical contexts.
Polar Classes
Most Marxists, as well as radical social democrats, advocated
polar class schemes that stressed class exploitation and
conict: exploiters vs exploited, rich vs poor. Thus the
Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, famously dened classes as
large groups of people differing from each other by the place
they occupy in a historically determined system of social
production, by their relation (in most cases xed and formu-
lated in law) to the means of production, by their role in
the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the
dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose
and the mode of acquiring it (Lenin, 1919/1928: 408).
 Class: History of the Concept 747

Occupational Classes seen as the main element of modern social structure, and as the
key element of occupational class stratication. This widening
The functional theorists, by contrast, identied classes with
popularity accompanied the ascendancy of class analysis
occupational groupings. Thus dened, classes were seen as
a type of social analysis focusing on class inequality and
elements of social differentiation, rather than social stratica-
antagonism. In the United States, class entered popular
tion. They complemented each other, even if competing for
vocabularies mainly via community studies, where class
material rewards, privileges (rents), and social recognition.
meant a social rank in a stratied community a group of
Many contemporary scholars, such as Grusky and Sorensen
families sharing a similar social status or standing (e.g.,
(1998), follow this analytic tradition and see social classes as
Warner, 1960).
hierarchically organized occupational microcommunities.
The Golden Age of class was in the 1960s80s when
Contemporary analysts of such occupational classes tend to
comparative national studies of class inequality, class strati-
stress competition between occupational classes, rather than
cation, and class mobility reached their peak. In such studies,
class conict. Studies of labor market differentiation and
social inequalities were portrayed as pyramids of hierarchical
segmentation, as well as analyses of professionalization, often
occupational classes. Class mobility was measured as circula-
refer to such concept of class (e.g., Grusky, 2005).
tion between those class locations, while mobility barriers
dened class closure. Class identications were treated as
Class Stratication universal master identities; politics in industrialized advanced
societies were analyzed as democratic class struggles; and
Finally and perhaps most signicantly class was redened cultural divisions were construed in terms of class cultures
by Max Weber and his followers as a market-based social (e.g., Giddens, 1973; Parkin, 1979; Goldthorpe, 1980; Wright,
stratication concept. Weberian classes, forming modern 1978; Lipset, 1960/1981). Perhaps the best known and most
social ladders, consisted of large social groupings that shared frequently used was a collapsible class-stratication scheme
similar types and levels of market endowments, that is, popularized worldwide by John Goldthorpe in international
property, skills, and labor power. They differed in degree of comparative studies of class structure and mobility (Erikson
social formation, that is, the degree to which class members and Goldthorpe, 1992) (Table 2).
shared mobility chances, lifestyles, and identities. The typical The concept of class was also applied although seldom
class structure of industrialized societies, according to Weber, ofcially to analyses of inequalities and conicts in the
consisted of four large and hierarchical social classes: the Soviet-type societies. Thus Wesolowski (1978) charted class
owner and manager class, the petit bourgeoisie or small owner and strata inequalities in Poland, while dissident scholars,
class (mainly shopkeepers and family businessmen), the white such as Djilas (1957) in Yugoslavia and Konrad and Szelenyi
collar (mainly clerical) class, and the manual working class. (1979) in Hungary singled out the intelligentsia and the party-
Social classes seldom gained a high level of class consciousness, state nomenklatura (patronage list of top party-state ofcials)
identity, and organization a view that contrasted with the
Marxist belief in the inevitable evolution of the major classes
into organized Klasse fr sich. Thus, the Weberian concept(s) of
Table 2 Goldthorpes class scheme
class became the major element of the burgeoning eld of
stratication and mobility studies. Full 11-class Seven-class Five-class Three-class
Initially, the Weberian reformulations were overshadowed version scheme scheme scheme
by the more radical Marxist vocabularies of class. In fact, the
early twentieth century marked the most dramatic period in 1. Higher
the history of class concept. World War I, the Bolshevik Professional
2. Lower Service class White collar
Revolution, and the Great Depression radicalized national
Professional (1 2) (13)
populations, thus forming receptive audiences for the Marxist 3a. Higher
concept of class in its polar and radical versions. In the highly administrator
industrialized western Europe, antagonistic class divisions, 3b. Sales & Sales & Nonmanual
class movements, and elaborate class ideologies formed service service (3) (14a)
a powerful stream of turbulent class politics competing with 4a. Small owner/
equally violent racistnationalist politics. This resulted not employer
only in mass radicalization, favoring the polar class schemes, 4b. Small owner Petty bourgeois Petty bourgeois
but also in reversals of democratization, emergence of radical (4a, 4b) (4a, 4b)
dictatorships (revolutionary dynamo states), brutal wars, 4c. Farmer Farmer (4c) Farm worker Farm worker
(4c) (4c)
and genocides: the SovietStalinist classicides and the Nazi
5. Lower Technician
ethnoracial genocides. 6. Skilled Manual Skilled worker Skilled worker Manual
(5 6) (5 6) (57)
7a. Semi- and Unskilled (7a) Unskilled
Proliferation, Decomposition, and Decline unskilled worker (7)
7b. Agricultural Agricultural
The class concept reached the peak of its popularity in the worker labor (7b)
1950s70s as the agship concept in the social sciences and in Based on Erikson, R., Goldthorpe, J., 1992. Constant Flux. Oxford University Press,
popular discourses on social stratication and mobility. It was Oxford.
748 Class: History of the Concept
as new and exploitative statesocialist ruling classes pitched
against the working classes.
Amid this proliferating class analyses, however, there
appeared some critical voices pointing to major trans-
formations in class structure and the declining relevance of
class. The advocates of embourgeoisement suggested that
spreading afuence, welfare reforms, and intense mobility lead
to the formation of middle class societies. The early advocates
of industrial society, like Ralf Dahrendorf (1959), pointed to
a progressive decomposition of major social classes that
resulted in proliferation of intraclass divisions, expansion of
the new and amorphous middle classes, intense mobility,
declining class identity, consciousness and solidarity, and
waning industrial class conict. The advocates of post-
industrial developments, like Daniel Bell (1973), in turn,
stressed the declining silence of class divisions and the growing
relevance of knowledge/education and sector location (social
situs). At the same time, the neo-Weberian scholars, like
Giddens (1973), pointed to the variability and exibility of
class structuration, and started to supplement class schemes
with rival concepts, such as elites, strata, and ethnoracial
underclass. In the meantime, students of occupational
attainment and class mobility (e.g., Blau and Duncan, 1967;
Goldthorpe, 1980; Heath, 1981) stressed the porous nature of
class boundaries and high intensity of interclass movements.
Even the neo-Marxist analysts, like E.O. Wright (1978), who
initially defended the Marxist class scheme, started to multiply
classes (from 4 to 12), stress the multidimensionality of class
structure, and admit the blurring of class divisions changes
that marked a turning point in the popularity of class and the
growing convergence between class and its conceptual rivals
(Wright, 1996, 1997; Table 3).
This convergence, however, was accompanied by confusion.
Thus, E.P. Thompson (1964: 9) dened class as a rather
nebulous historical phenomenon, unifying a number of
disparate and seemingly unconnected events. I do not see
class as a structure nor even as a category Thompson
declared but as something which in fact happens . when
some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or
shared) feel and articulate the identity of their interests as
between themselves, and against other men whose interests
are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. Class
concept, in other words, started to lose consistency and
clarity, and with it also its analytic utility.
The advocates of class did not give ground without a ght.
The prominent class analysts were busy adapting the concept to
proliferating social and cultural studies. Prominent sociologists
Table 3 Wrights class scheme
Relations to the means of production
Owner
Many Capitalist Expert manager
Number of Employees Few Small employer Expert supervisor
None Petty bourgeois Expert worker
Expert
Relations to scarce skills
Based on Wright, E.O., 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
tried to explain the fuzziness and uidity of new class divi-
sions by pointing to changing work conditions and intense
mobility (Goldthorpe), diverse patterns of class structuration
(Giddens), variation in class closure and class formation
(Parkin), and by the emergence of altogether new classes
(Poulantzas, Wright).
A vigorous defense of class as a relevant and useful concept
was also undertaken by the neo-Marxist world system or
dependency theorists, such as Immanuel Wallerstein (1974),
and by the culturalists like Pierre Bourdieu (1984/1979).
Wallerstein and his followers (including Christopher Chase-
Dunn and Daniel Chirot) argued that class divisions and
conicts should be reconceptualized within a global world-
systemic theoretical framework as structural world-market
divisions between families of nation-states. They
distinguished between internal classes (within nation-states)
and global classes: capitalist core (consisting of the most
developed nation-states) and the underdeveloped periphery
(consisting of developing regions). Between them there were
semiperipheral societies, such as Australia and Canada, as
well as noncapitalist societies of the Soviet type. Popularity of
these global (world-market) class schemes faded with the
collapse of Soviet-type societies and the rapid development
of the industrializing nations both contradicting the
predictions of dependency theorists. Even when S.M. Lipset,
the doyen of class analysis in America, abandoned his
original scheme of class politics and democratic class
struggle (Clark and Lipset, 1991), the defenders of class and
class analysis were conrming its new relevance (e.g., Hout
et al., 1995; Wright, 1996).
While losing its popularity among mainstream analysts,
class continued to be deployed by global class theorists who
suggested the denationalization of classes, such as the trans-
national bourgeoisie (Robinson, 2004: 4957). Sassen (2007:
167170) has distinguished three such denationalized classes:
transnational corporate professionals and executives, top state
executives, and an emergent class of disadvantaged or
resource-poor workers and activists.
Bourdieus (1984, 2001)culturalist reconceptualization of
class has opened the debate about the importance of cultural
capital (closely identied with education, taste, and lifestyle)
and cultural domination in generating new class divisions.
According to Bourdieu, diverse lifestyles reect distinctive
habituses, which, in turn, are organized in the process of social
cultural contest into hierarchical (in relation to legitimate
culture) and antagonistic classes. The subordinate/working
classes contest social and cultural domination of dominant/
Employees
Skilled manager Nonskilled manager
Skilled supervisor Nonskilled supervisor Relation to authority
Skilled worker Nonskilled worker
Skilled Nonskilled

ruling classes. But classes are many, and they are diverse, fuzzy,
and ckle. Their composition and boundaries constantly
change. Moreover, as stressed by Weininger (2005), class
divisions and conicts analyzed by Bourdieu always fuse with
much older and more entrenched racial and gender divisions
and conicts. The latter cannot be separated from
contemporary class antagonisms, thus generating a complex
web of crosscutting hierarchical divisions.
Bourdieus approach has not only popularized but also
further diluted the concept of class. It now applies to any
socially recognized division: market-occupational, cultural-
lifestyle, status-consumption, etc. and it acquired gender and
racial dimensions that further complicate class analysis. Alas,
the initial enthusiasm greeting Bourdieus analyses started to
fade when it became apparent that his exible and inclusive
class scheme cannot be operationalized in a clear way.
The Proliferation of Classes or the Death of Class?
As far as the concept of class is concerned, the current (2014)
state of affairs is variously characterized as either an adaptive
proliferation or as the death of class, a progressive waning of
the class concept and its disappearance from academic and
popular vocabularies.
The prominent neo-Marxist scholar E.O. Wright
(WisconsinMadison), together with and Richard Breen
(Oxford), neo-Ricardian analysts, such as Aage Sorensen
(Harvard), and the neo-Durkheimian David Grusky
(Stanford), have recently suggested that the concept of class
and the accompanying class analysis do not decline in
relevance, but simply diversify and adapt to new global and
postindustrial conditions (Wright, 2005). Consequently,
what the term class means and denotes depends on the
social-historical and theoretical contexts within which the
concept is embedded. And these contexts continue to
multiply. For the British neo-Weberian, Anthony Giddens
(2006: 300), class is a large scale grouping of people who
share common economic resources, which strongly inuence
the type of life they are able to lead. Ownership of wealth,
together with occupation, are the chief bases of class
differences. For an American (analytic) neo-Marxist, Wright
(2005: 1621), class refers to structural category of people
located in similar (unequal and exploitative) ownership/work
relations. For a follower of neoclassical economics, Sorensen
(2005: 119152), class denotes a category of people who
extract similar economic rents, that is, similar privileges and
disadvantages. For a neo-Durkheimian, David Grusky (2005:
5181), class is identical with a cohesive occupational group
community and it forms the main element of contemporary
social stratication. Followers of Bourdieu, by contrast, see
classes as blurred but antagonistic social-cultural groupings,
and they draw complex class maps combining economic
and cultural capitals. Students of globalization add to the
widening gallery of competing class concepts transnational
classes. Structural and hierarchical delineations of classes
compete with those that denote a capacity for solidary
collective action. You can pick your class concept and
theoreticalanalytic framework whichever you nd relevant
and attractive.
Class: History of the Concept 749
Other scholars, the class skeptics, claim that class is dying
and class analysis has been losing its relevance and utility
(e.g., Beck, 1992; Clark et al., 1993; Pakulski and Waters, 1996;
Clark and Lipset, 1991, 2001). This does not mark the end of
social hierarchy, but a change in the forms of this hierarchy,
division, and conict. The old divisions for which the concept
of class was originally forged have been decomposing, the
accompanying class identities decline, and the lifestyles and
politics associated with those divisions have withered away.
Class inequalities, in other words, are gradually replaced
by uid and diverse although often steep classless
inequalities. Class is no longer a useful analytic concept-tool,
especially in studies of the contemporary stratication
resembling a status bazaar. Contemporary cultures diversify
into uid subcultures and they spawn cultural omnivores
whose tastes and lifestyles defy Bourdiesque habituses. Politics
also lose their class moorings. Classvoterparty
dealignment has resulted in the rapid decline of class
identication and class voting. This is accompanied by
a gradual withering away of class issues, class parties, and
class politics. They are replaced by celebrity issues, risk
concerns, cartel-type parties, and populist politics. Patterns
of political association and action detach themselves from
the old class-related ideological packages. So do the issue
agendas of social movements and mass parties. Both
abandon class issues, vocabularies, and ideological programs
(e.g., Beck, 1992; Giddens, 2000; Pakulski, 2005).
Consequently, the major developments in the last three
decades the crisis and collapse of the Soviet Union,
the unication of Europe, the ascendancy of market
liberalism, the mobilization of powerful new movements,
(left-libertarian and right populist), the eruptions of terror-
containment wars, and the trans-Atlantic Great Recession
all defy analysis and explanation in class terms.
The major public and academic sources today dene class
in most general terms, often detached from theoretical
contexts. Thus the Princeton Web Encyclopedia Glossary (2013)
denes class as people having the same social, economic, or
educational status, while Wikipedia (2013) an increasingly
popular source sees Social class (or simply class), as in
a class society, [as] a set of concepts in the social sciences
and political theory centered on models of social
stratication in which people are grouped into a set of
hierarchical social categories, the most common being the
upper, middle, and lower classes. Moreover, the popularity
of the concept continues to decline. While class dominated as
a topic and referent in sociological journals in the 1970s and
1980s, it was mentioned in only 15% of British Sociological
Association (BSA) articles at the turn of the century, and in
only 8% of articles in Sociology in 2010 (Payne, 2011).
See also: Capitalism: The History of the Concept; Class
Consciousness; Class: Social; Income Inequality; Inequality,
Social; Inequality: Comparative Aspects; Marxism in
Contemporary Sociology; MarxismLeninism: The Ideology of
Twentieth-Century Communism; Revolution, Theories of;
Revolutions, History of; Revolutions, Sociology of; Russian
Revolution, The; Social Inequality in History (Stratication
And classes).
750 Class: History of the Concept
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Relevant Websites
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