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Does class analysis still have anything to contribute to the study of politics? — comments

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Conclusion

We can accept Michael Mann's recent claim that in their endless debates about the social and political importance of class, sociologists are sometimes guilty of engaging in what he calls “classrurbation.”Footnote 1 Far from being an intellectually immature activity, classturbation — to apply the former U.S. Surgeon General's remarks to a novel context — is in reality a safe and productive outlet for healthy questions about the linkages between inequalities and political alignments. We recognize, as does every serious contemporary class analyst we have ever read, that a class-analytic framework can shed light on some types of social phenomena, but not others. It certainly is true that class analysis no longer has any claim, if it ever did, to a privileged position in the development of a critical sociology. But we firmly reject PW's claims that for class to matter in understanding political behavior, its effects must necessarily be larger than that of all other salient cleavages for every time and place. Not only have class analyses of political behavior progressed well beyond dated and misleading conceptualizations, they provide no evidence for a universal pattern of class dealignment.

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Notes

  1. Michael Mann, “Sources of Variation in Working Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe,” New Left Review 22 (1995): 14–54.

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Manza, J., Brooks, C. Does class analysis still have anything to contribute to the study of politics? — comments. Theor Soc 25, 717–724 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00188103

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