[MWS 18.1 (2018) 140-148] ISSN 1470-8078 http://dx.doi.org/10.15543/MWS/2018/1/9© Max Weber Studies 2018, Rm 4-12, London Metropolitan University, 84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ. Book Reviews M. Rainer Lepsius, Soziale Schichtung in der industriellen Gesellschaft, with a foreword by Oliver Lepsius and an introduction by Wolfgang Schluchter (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2015). It is tempting to ask what would have happened if Rainer Lepsius had published his Habilitation on Social Stratification in Industrial Society back then in 1963. As his son Oliver reports in the foreword, and as I can testify having passed my own Habilitation on Social Structure and Styles of Life1 under his and Wolfgang Schluchter’s supervision in Heidelberg, he mentioned time and again that he should have done so. What a mistake. But the last chapter was missing and some finishing touches on the whole corpus of the text would have been necessary. Since his academic career took off so rapidly—he was quickly put in charge of establishing the social sciences at the University of Mannheim, and then had to step in after Ralf Dahrendorf ’s demise as President of the German Sociological Association in the wake of 1968 to ‘save’ this society from the fate of dissolution— he basically had no time to get back to his Habilitation. In the early 1970s Marxism had captured the attention in class analysis and Lepsius would have been forced to acknowledge these new theoretical developments by adding a chapter on Marxist class analysis. This, however, he never did. Therefore, this analytically rich and important text did not see the light of the day until after his death on October 2, 2014. Habent sua fata libelli. Books have their own fate, indeed, particularly in the case of Lepsius . Without doubt, the publication would have made him one of the preeminent scholars in the field of social inequality. Instead, if he is known in the social scientific world outside of Germany at all, he counts as an institutional thinker, but not as a student of social stratification. Interestingly enough, he is both: a class analyst and an institutionalist. How is this possible? Lepsius dealt with questions of class, inequality, and stratification in a couple of articles, and a superficial reading might regard them as casual papers about 1. See Hans-Peter Müller, Sozialstruktur und Lebensstile. Der neuere theoretische Diskurs über soziale Ungleichheit, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). Book Reviews 141© Max Weber Studies 2018. different aspects of this field of studies. But upon closer look, it turns out that Lepsius had an underlying research agenda. Since he followed in the footsteps of Max Weber’s multidimensional approach of ‘Class, Status, and Party’, he set out to explore how these different dimensions interrelate. What Weber had separated analytically , he wanted to study theoretically and empirically, to discover the intricate relationships between economic differentiation, political interest formation, and cultural value orientations. Lepsius was looking for mechanisms: how economy, politics, and culture operate together with respect to social structure and social inequality. Weber never solved these relationships between life chances and styles of life. Lepsius, however, took Weber’s missing links and interfaces as the construction sites for his own approach. His Habilitation formed the backdrop for his analytical reflections . In seven short but clear-cut chapters, Lepsius put forward a critical analysis of the theory of stratification in order to develop his own approach for the study of social inequality. Between the 1940s and 1960s this topic attracted a lot of attention in international sociology . The crucial vantage point was the question of how and in which way the postwar boom and the long period of growth and prosperity would affect class structure and social stratification in Western societies. Lepsius encountered three different positions (p. 2) in German postwar sociology: 1. The class society of the 19th century has been replaced by growing social differentiation, as Theodor Geiger and René König held; 2. The distinctions between classes have vanished due to enormous growth and prosperity, and a ‘nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft’ (‘a levelled middle class society’, per Helmut Schelsky) has emerged displaying a comparable standard of living as well...