ABSTRACT

In classical Political Economy in England the notion of class, and to some extent of class conflict, occupied a prominent place. Inequality of opportunity is an essential ingredient of the situation from which class conflict is born. Emphasis on the significance of other forms of social grouping probably has greater plausibility for most people than the contention that divergence of class interest rarely occurs. When one speaks of an economic interest as a basis of conflict, is it of a real or of an imagined interest that it is proper to speak; is it the short-period or the long-period interest which one is to regard as decisive? It is largely out of circumstances that class consciousness is apparently born; it is then that a class from being an economic potentiality becomes a political actuality; and it is largely to the occurrence of such situations that the author believe one must look as the basis for actual class conflict.