The Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness: An Overview

Abstract

The Comparative Project on class structure and class consciousness began in 1977 as an attempt to remedy what I felt was a serious shortcoming in the Marxist tradition of research within sociology. Until very recently empirical investigations within the Marxist tradition have been almost exclusively restricted to historical and qualitative research. This is to be explained by a variety of factors: the general hostility of radical scholars in general to 'positivism'; the particular substantive concerns of Marxists with broad historical dynamics; the general hostility of academic programs that stress quantitative methods to the kinds of theoretical concerns and political commitments of Marxist students. Whatever the explanation, however, Marxist intellectuals have generally not pursued quantitative strategies of research. As a graduate student in sociology in the early 1970s I decided that it was important for Marxism to engage in serious and systematic quantitative research. On the one hand, I felt that if Marxism was to be taken seriously within US sociology, it was necessary to demonstrate its explanatory power on the central terrain of academic sociology, which is clearly quantitative research. This does not mean that quantification should preempt other lines of research, nor that it should be treated as some kind of privileged basis for developing and reconstructing theoretical arguments. But simply to abandon that terrain completely risked perpetuating the marginality of Marxism within the academy. On the other hand, quite apart from problems of strengthening the academic legitimacy of Marxism, I felt that Marxism itself had much to gain from statistical research, both because of the conceptual discipline it imposes on the clarification of arguments (so that they can be operationalized), and because at least some of the important questions which are traditionally asked by Marxists can be illuminated through multivariate empirical strategies. One problem faced by an aspiring 'multivariate Marxist', however, was the lack of suitable data for such research. All of the already-existing datasets of which I was aware had been gathered by scholars working in other theoretical traditions,