The Genealogy of 'class': Between Mobilization and Amelioration

From its canonized origins to the present, sociology has taken 'class' as a core topic of analysis. However, there have been arguments that 'class' is no longer a relevant conceptual category for measuring the dynamics of inequality in the contemporary world (e.g., Beck 2002), or that class no longer binds individuals together as self-conscious groupings. In the meantime, non-class and non-economic-based injustices have come to the fore: namely those rooted in racial, gender, or sexual inequalities.

Against this backdrop, this paper offers a genealogy 'class' with the aim of showing how symbolic struggles of the past continue to shape today's efforts to salvage, reclaim or transcend this concept. In the nineteenth century, the nauseant fields of inquiry that later coalesced into sociology took notice of 'class' and attempted to devise analytical tools to capture and represent it. Two narratives stand out in this regard: The critical work of Marx and Marx-aligned intellectuals who saw class inequality as the inevitable outcome of the bourgeois monopolization of the means of production, on the one hand, and ameliorative capitalism's conception of class on the other hand. The latter includes the work of a diverse array of bourgeois or bourgeoisie-aligned scholars who sought to channel working class struggles into reformist solutions. These two lines of inquiry are exemplified by Friedrich Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), on the one hand, and James Kay-Shuttleworth’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832).

While reviewing these duelling narratives, this paper aims to give a glimpse into the emergence of ‘class’ as an analytical category and its intertwinement with political and ideological struggles characteristic of modern western European history. It will also discuss how these duelling narratives continue to inform sociological perspectives on class today.