ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the underclass in the USA and that country’s explosive mixture of poverty, race and mass incarceration. Social class allegedly identifies components of the social structure: it involves social relations, power and ultimately politics. Contemporary theories of social class examine the emergence of a middle mass in contemporary European societies and the realignment of class politics. Class in contemporary sociology is clearly delimited from Marxist or ‘strong’ class theory in which social classes are seen as social actors. Up until the 1970s sociological class theory, whether Marxist or neo-Weberian, tended to assume that there was one major division in society, normally taken to be that between manual and non-manual workers. Whereas theories of political de-alignment suggested that the connection between social class and party voting had become unimportant, new class analyses suggest a process of class realignment.
