ABSTRACT
During the two decades preceding the 1990s, the notion of classes was a pivotal aspect of political and sociological analysis before almost fading away in recent years. It seems as if this marginalization of the class concept in social research was the outcome of, and response to, both the crisis of Marxism in the 1980s and the dissolution of ‘real existing socialism’. This is not surprising when taking into consideration the subjective factor of social sciences as well as the problem of research persistently lagging behind events happening in the ‘real world’. In the 1970s, the theory and method of dialectical materialism and the Marxist critique of capitalism had an almost hegemonic discursive status in the ‘sociology of Zeitgeist’, not only in development studies but also in social research in general. Marxism appeared already to have come to an impasse in the mid-1980s due to a generalized theoretical disorientation and the lack of openness to diversity (Booth 1985; 1994). Moreover, research within critical social change perspectives and Marxist studies became confronted with a trend towards renewed empiricism and with intellectual positions stemming from postmodernism and postcolonialism (Corbridge 1994: 90; 112 fn. 2). 1
