ABSTRACT
The analysis of class which emerged with the tradition of political economy initiated by Adam Smith and David Ricardo was continued by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels later in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that no formal identification of class analysis appeared in the latters’ work the project of such an analysis is indissolubly linked with their confident assertion in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.’ It is from this assertion that much of the subsequent elaboration of class analysis begins. At least three stages of analytical development have been identified in their work. These progressively invoke varying problems with the relationship between classes and their economic context. It must be repeated, however, that Marx’s and Engels’s primary analytical purpose was not to provide a systematic analysis of social class but to examine the salience of the presumed fact of class structure for the development of dynamic tendencies in a typical capitalist economy.
