ABSTRACT
The political scientist Peter Calvert sees a clear link between the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and the evolution of the notion of class. In modern capitalist society, the class struggle has accelerated two principal rival classes namely: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Crompton considers the sociologist Anthony Giddens's book The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies a useful attempt to bridge the Weberian division between material structures and historic actors. In contrast to structuralism and the tradition that dated back to Antonio Gramsci and his emphasis on the importance of culture in the formation of classes, Thompson and the cultural historians Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart moved in a direction that has since been christened culturalism. This chapter explains the beginnings of an intersectional analysis of the close interrelatedness of different repressive regimes, and insights that would serve later feminists and post-structuralists well in their questioning of the grand narrative of class.
