ABSTRACT
The class system is dead. (Prince Edward)
Proclamations of the death of the class system lack shock value when articulated by a member of the royal family. They can simply be dismissed as ignorant and arrogant mutterings of those who occupy social positions that lack any connection whatsoever with the everyday ‘reality’ of most ‘ordinary’ people’s lives. Unfortunately those who opine about the death of the class system are not simply confined to the fine and well-bred specimens that constitute the aristocracy. A belief in the irrelevance of class is now so pervasive within the social sciences that issues of deprivation are treated with an indifference, or even disdain, that issues from an arrogance born of security (Charlesworth 2000). Contemporary sociology has become embroiled in ‘new’ concerns (‘individualisation’, ‘identity’, ‘difference’, ‘risk’, ‘mobilities’ etc.) that reflect the lifestyle preoccupations of its middle-class intelligentsia, whose social position is parasitic on a discriminatory higher education system that reproduces the conditions of their class privilege (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Reay 2001a; Reay et al. 2001) and that, to add insult to injury, they then use to proclaim the ‘death of class’ (Charlesworth 2000; Skeggs 2004). As the sociological agenda has shifted towards these ‘post-material’ concerns of ‘lifestyle politics’ (Giddens 1991) studies of working-class existence have sunk to the bottom of the hierarchy of intellectual subjects (Charlesworth 2000). The decline in the symbolic profits to be gained from scholarship on working-class existence has thus resulted in a recent dearth of publishing in this area (Charlesworth 2000), certainly when compared with the volume of scholarship on issues such as ‘risk’, ‘identity’ and ‘difference’.
