Class

Sociologists have offered several different accounts of what class is and why it matters, and this section briefly sketches three of the most influential: those of Marx, Weber, and the functionalists.

For Marx, social classes are defined by a group's relationship to the means of production — that is, whether a group owns productive property such as land or factories, or owns nothing but its own capacity to labour, which it must then sell to those who do own such property. This relationship, for Marx, is the basic fault line around which class conflict is organised.

Max Weber offered a related but distinct account, built around the idea of 'life-chances' — the rewards and advantages a person can command because of their position in the market. Weber's account is broader than Marx's in one important respect: while it agrees that inequality can arise from economic relations, it insists that inequality can equally arise from prestige (social honour) or from political power, which do not always track a person's economic position exactly.

The functionalist account starts from a different premise altogether: functionalists argue that no society has ever existed, or could exist, entirely without stratification, because every society faces the practical problem of filling its various social positions — including its most important and demanding ones — with people who are actually motivated and qualified to fill them. On this view, social inequality is less a form of oppression than an unconsciously evolved device that ensures the most capable people are drawn into the most functionally important positions, and rewarded accordingly. Whether this justification genuinely holds is a fair question to ask, rather than to simply accept. …