ABSTRACT
The concept of “class” has . . . often been seen by critics of sociology as a defining characteristic of the discipline: sociologists, they hold, reduce everything to class.
—John Scott, Stratification and Power Lipset’s article “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”
(1959), published more than four decades ago, still plays a major role in the discussion on the relation between class and political values.1 It introduces a distinction between two types of political values: economic liberalism/conservatism and authoritarianism/libertarianism. According to Lipset, the working class is at the liberal end of the former ideological dichotomy. Its members advocate economic redistribution by the state and thus reject a distribution based on the free market. Regarding the latter, pertaining to tolerance of nonconformity, acceptance of unconventional lifestyles, and respect for individual liberty, working-class liberalism is out of the question: “Economic liberalism refers to the conventional issues concerning redistribution of income, status, and power among the
Dick Houtman is an assistant professor of sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a member of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR). His principal research interest is cultural change in late modernity and the way it restructures the political and religious domains. This article is drawn from his first book-length work in English, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: ‘Marxism Lite’ and Its Blind Spot for Culture (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003).
