Class, Social

The Changing Meanings of Social Class

Since its earliest use, the meaning of class has fluctuated between a description of social groupings and a political relationship. The concept first appeared with the uses of the Latin word classis, by Roman census takers, to differentiate the population on the basis of wealth and property to determine obligations for military service. However, in the seventeenth century, the first use of the English word class encompassed a general classification for categories of plants, animals, objects, or people.

The usage of the term that connected economic power and social groupings, similar to the modern usage, reappeared in the nineteenth century around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Class began to replace words such as rank, estates, order, and degree as the primary classification of social groupings under modern capitalism. The main social divisions in capitalist society became (1) those owning the means of production (the instruments and raw materials of the productive process) and (2) the workers in the new urban factories dependent on their labor for wages.

Karl Marx

Much of the present-day understanding of the term class emerging in the nineteenth century came from the writings of the German sociologist Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx was not the first theorist to analyze the concept of class; the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and the social reformer ClaudeHenri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) all had begun developing the idea of class divisions in society. Marx, however, is recognized as the first person to explore fully the causes and consequences of a stratified society according to class. He considered the concept of class not as a stratum or fragment of the population but as a relationship based on people's positions vis-à-vis the means of production.

Marx's analysis, adapted from his mentor Georg Hegel (1770–1831), is rooted in dialectical reasoning—a method of examining the evolution and development of society not as a series of unconnected historical events but as an interconnected process of contradictions and change. Marx believed one could uncover certain societal laws that explain the transformations of social systems from one historical epoch to the next. But unlike Hegel, who believed the transformation of ideas heralded new stages in human development, Marx saw the antagonisms between classes in the productive process or economy as the fulcrum of revolution. “The history of all hitherto existing society” wrote Marx, “is the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels 1848). Throughout time, various modes of production (the state of technology and the division of labor) are composed of two basic classes—producers and nonproducers. Producers create the goods and wealth of society. Non-producers live off the surplus of the producers' labor through the ownership of the means of production—the factories, land, property, and machinery of society.

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