ABSTRACT
A growing body of research on the middle classes in South Africa is reigniting an older
debate in the social sciences between competing theoretical conceptions of class, and the
methods we use to research class in the contemporary world (Seekings & Nattrass, 2000;
Southall, 2004, 2014; Crankshaw, 2005; Schlemmer, 2005; Alexander et al., 2013;
Melber, 2013). Seekings (2009) and Southall (2004) have discussed how the two
dominant and contrasting approaches to class – neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian –
have shaped social science discourse in South Africa (see also Burger et al., 2014).
Seekings’ (2009) explanation for the dominance of neo-Marxist approaches in the
social science literature on South Africa since the 1970s is especially important, as is
his call for scholars to familiarise themselves with an earlier ‘Weberian moment in
South African social science’ and to build on an existing ‘history of non-Marxist
analysis of stratification in South Africa’ (2009:881). This earlier Weberian moment
was characterised by a number of important sociological and anthropological texts
published in the 1960s and early 1970s on urban life under apartheid, specifically
Kuper (1965), Brandel-Syrier (1971), and Wilson & Mafeje (1963).
