The Concept of Social Class Applied to Post-Industrial Western European Societies

Abstract

The concept of «social class» has undergone a great number of transformations during the last decades. Among them, it is worth mentioning the consideration of social class as a notion associated with the most enriched human groups within a social group, and its consideration as a pure and exclusive term of Marxism. Little or nothing, however, can be articulated from such extremely reduced theoretical assumptions. This paper aims to expose how «social class» is a concept with social implications beyond its narrative, a concept fully linked to transformative and/or revolutionary action. It also explains how its nature has been modified for post-industrial societies in Western Europe during the twentieth century, and finally, and as a direct consequence of the above, how the concept has been gradually eliminated from political and public debate in general.