Class as a Social Fact

Abstract

Use of the concept of class in sociology has come under three types of attack: that it contains residues of an unacceptable Marxist holism or otherwise lacks explanatory power; that it is an essentially contested and, therefore, ambiguous term and, that it is decreasingly relevant to contemporary social conditions. This article argues that all three criticisms are mistaken and have only become possible because of the survival of economistic thinking in both the Marxist and Weberian mainstream traditions in sociology. Class analysis needs to be rethought in Durkheimian terms as an externally constraining social, not economic, fact. Such an approach entails recognition of the role of money circulation as a collective representation through which the social division of labour is framed and classified. It is argued that this approach can be adopted without conceptual ambiguity, is consistent with existing research on the `impersonal possession' of private and public capital and complements the enduring contributions of existing class theories.