ABSTRACT
For the most significant developments in the theory of classes since Marx, we have to look to those forms of social thought whose authors, while being directly influenced by Marx’s ideas, have attempted at the same time to criticise or to reformulate them. This tendency has been strongest, for a combination of historical and intellectual reasons, in German sociology, where a series of attempts have been made to provide a fruitful critique of Marx—beginning with Max Weber, and continuing through such authors as Geiger, Renner and Dahrendorf. 1 Weber’s critique of Marx here has been of particular importance. But, especially in the English-speaking world, the real import of Weber’s analysis has frequently been misrepresented. The customary procedure has been to contrast Weber’s discussion of ‘Class, status and party’, a fragment of Economy and Society, with the conception of class supposedly taken by Marx, to the detriment of the latter. Marx, so it is argued, treated ‘class’ as a purely economic phenomenon and, moreover, regarded class conflicts as in some way the ‘inevitable’ outcome of clashes of material interest. He failed to realise, according to this argument, that the divisions of economic interest which create classes do not necessarily correspond to sentiments of communal identity which constitute differential ‘status’. Thus, status, which depends upon subjective evaluation, is a separate ‘dimension of stratification’ from class, and the two may vary independently. There is yet a third dimension, so the argument continues, which Weber recognised as an independently variable factor in ‘stratification’, but which Marx treated as directly contingent upon class interests. This is the factor of ‘power’. 2
