Class - Early Histories, The Renewal Of Class, The Marxist Transformation, The Weberian Reply, Marxist Rejoinders
classis term division social
The term class is used in a wide range of intellectual discourses, including logic, the natural sciences, and pedagogy. At its Latin origins, however, classis was first and foremost a social term, denoting the division of the Roman people attributed to King Servius Tullius (r. 578–534 B.C.E.). In early Rome, class connoted a distinction in rank between those who paid tribute (property tax) and those who did not, as well as the system of divisions between types of military service. In particular, classis often seems to have been reserved to describe citizens on the lower social and economic rungs. Only after the principate of Augustus (31 B.C.E.–14 A.D.) did classis come to be employed in a more general sense to mean a division of all sorts of things into groups.
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The Latin genesis of class nomenclature does not mean that the idea behind it (in either a social or general sense) did not exist prior to the rise of the Roman Republic. Aristotle's Organon proposed a logical system of classification of natural and linguistic types into genus and species according to categorical criteria. For the ancient Greeks, the Few and the Many constituted a central m…
For the first millennium and more of European history, the term class was not invoked in order to describe the distinctions between and identities of social groups. Rather, class was invoked through what we might call "status language," such as gradus in Latin, état in French, Stand in German, and "orders" or "estates" in English. At the end of the ei…
Without doubt, the most famous promulgator of the idea of class in the modern world was also its most profound critic: Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx treated class distinction as a universal characteristic of human history from the earliest times of social organization until his own day. For Marx, classes were economic groups constituted by differential access to the means of production—…
The primary response to Marx's conception of class was proposed by the German sociological thinker Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber's main insight was to recognize the empirical faults of an exclusive emphasis on class as an economic phenomenon. Rather, Weber saw society—in particular, in the modern world—as far too complex in its stratification to fit into the strai…
Somewhat ironically, many of the fiercest critics of the classical Marxist doctrine of class would consider themselves to fall into the Marxist camp. The failure of the proletariat to rise up against and to crush capitalism even as the conditions of its exploitation worsened led some Marxists, especially in Western Europe, to revisit Marx's conception of class struggle. The so-called Frankf…
An important trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been to resist both Marxian and Weberian theories of social differentiation in favor of other fundamental sources of division among human beings. Feminism provides an example of one such line of reasoning. Feminist theory claims that gender, rather than class, constitutes the defining division in human historical dynamics.…
See also Communism; Critical Race Theory; Marxism; Power. Brennan, Catherine. Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification: An Introduction and Critique. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997. Brown, Donald E. Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. Calvert, Peter. The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction. Ne…
Brennan, Catherine. Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification: An Introduction and Critique. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997. Brown, Donald E. Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. Calvert, Peter. The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction. New York: St. Martin's, 1982. Carling, Alan H. Social…
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