Who said britain was a classless society

With so many fluctuating and sometimes contradictory senses of identity that constantly cut across each other, there no longer seems any justification for privileging class identity--or class analysis. Not surprisingly, then, Marx has been one of the most conspicuous casualties of our postindustrial, postsocialist, post-cold war, postmodern world, for it is a post-Marxist world as well.

Indeed, the reaction against Marxism and class analysis is now flowing so strongly that the most recent and authoritative social history of modern Britain, which runs to three large and otherwise comprehensive volumes, managed to leave out the subject completely, thereby giving an entirely new meaning to the injunction "class dismissed.

Christopher Hill no longer insists that the English Civil War was the first bourgeois revolution. Eric Hobsbawm has shifted his interests from class and class conflict in nineteenth-century Europe to nationalism, national identity, and the twentieth century.

And in one of his last essays, E. It is a concept long past its sell-by date. For present purposes, it does not matter; either way, class today is not what it once was.

It has had a great fall. But the difficulty with banishing class from modern British history in the way it has increasingly become fashionable to do is that it leaves us incapable of understanding what it was that John Major was talking about or why what he said resonated--and is still resonating--so widely.

For if he was right in asserting that Britain is still a class-bound society, then it is little short of bizarre that in recent years historians have been spending so much time and effort denying that this was so and, by implication, that this is still so. If we accept, as we are surely correct in doing, that class is one of the most important aspects of modern British history no less than of modern British life, then it is at best regrettable and at worst plain wrong for the current generation of historians to show minimal interest in the subject.

Even if, in its crudest forms, the Marxist approach to class no longer carries conviction, that is no reason for dismissing class altogether.

The baby, still kicking vigorously, should be retained, even though the bathwater, long since grown tepid, has rightly been jettisoned.

For the most important and immediate task is neither that of denying nor rehabilitating old-style class analysis but of defining the subject afresh and envisioning it anew. In order to do so, we need to be clear as to the central problem with the traditional approach to class. This was not that it sought to study or understand class, both of which are entirely worthwhile scholarly objectives.

The difficulties were those arising from mistaken identity and excessive expectations. Most Marxists believed that a person's class identity was collective rather than individual and was primarily determined by his or, just occasionally, her relationship to the means of production. But this was clearly too narrow, too materialistic, too reductionist an approach, and it assumed that all social identities were shared rather than single. Moreover, these collective classes, as defined and understood by Marx, showed a high degree of internal coherence and homogeneity.

Again, this seems to have been an oversimplification. And he also assumed a direct causal link not only between economic development and social change but also between social change and political events. This, too, seems excessively crude.

In short, the sort of classes for which Marxists searched never existed as they hoped to find them. And so it is hardly surprising that class as it has actually existed did not fulfill its task as the animator and agitator of the historical process that Marx had wished on it.

But how has class actually existed? In seeking to answer that question, we should also recognize that where Marx was on to something was in his insistence that the material circumstances of people's existences--physical, financial, environmental--do matter in influencing their life chances, their senses of identity, and the historical part that they and their contemporaries may or may not play.

Whatever the devotees of the "linguistic turn" may claim, class is not just about language. There is reality as well as representation. Go to Toxteth, go to Wandsworth, go to Tyneside, go to Balsall Heath, and tell the people who live in the slums and the council estates and the high-rise ghettos that their sense of social structure and social identity is no more than a subjective rhetorical construction, that it is nothing beyond a collection of individual self-categorizations.

It seems unlikely that they will agree. Nor, for that matter, would the inhabitants of Edgbaston or Eastbourne, Belgravia or Buckingham Palace. Class, like sex, may indeed take place in the head, but it has never existed solely in the head or in the eyes or in the words of the beholder. Social reality always keeps breaking in. Classes, like nations, are sometimes more and sometimes less than imagined communities.

All of which is simply to say that language is a necessary but insufficient guide, to both social circumstances and social consciousness. We need to get beyond the "linguistic turn. It is somewhere between the overdetermined reductionism of Marxist analysis and the free-floating subjectivities of the historians of language that we should seek to discover, describe, and discuss class as it has actually existed and developed in Britain during the last three hundred years.

But where, in making such a fresh start, might we most helpfully begin? One appropriate place is with a long view of Britain's evolving--or, rather, nonevolving--social structure from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth.

If we borrow W. Runciman's recent typology, it is clear that across this long span, British society has been continually characterized by what he terms four "systactic" categories: a small elite; a larger group of managers, businessmen, and professionals; the general body of wage workers; and a deprived, impoverished, and sometimes criminalized underclass. These general social-cum-occupational groups have been a constant across the centuries of modern British history, and an abundance of recent, more detailed research into patterns of wealth distribution and occupational structure amply bears this out.

Indeed, it has been the gradual piecing together of this long-term picture of un changingness that has done much to subvert the old Marxist or Marxisant notion that the historical process was built around the economically driven processes of rapid social development, sudden class creation, and abrupt class conflict.

This is not, it now seems, the way in which things in the British past actually happened. Class also has a geography as well as a history. Local studies of villages, towns, cities, and regions by definition tell us a great deal about particular places. But they are also, by definition, prone to parochialism and introversion, and they dislike and avoid making generalizations or seeking broader patterns. Yet we need to remember that across the last three centuries these localities were embedded in many wider worlds: not just the four nations of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales but also the larger identifies of Great Britain and the British Isles.

Moreover, for much of the period with which this book is concerned Britain was an imperial power and an expanding society. And for the entire period there were British-spawned nations across the seas that, with their shared backgrounds but different economies, both mirrored and distorted the social structure of the homeland.

Most British colonies remained agricultural and rural long after Britain was industrializing and urbanizing. In Canada and South Africa, British settlers and lawmakers encountered alien races with alien social structures. In Australia and New Zealand, they self-consciously transplanted British communities overseas, rejecting some aspects of the mother country while maintaining and extending others.

And in India, the Raj evolved into the most elaborate imperial hierarchy of all, with its British proconsuls and officials, its native princely states, and its caste system. On the boundaries of empire, at the frontiers of dominion and settlement, much was revealed about the social structure of Britain itself. But these are merely the essential preliminaries to the central question about class as this book poses and address it.

How, across a long time span and from a broad geographical perspective, can we recover the ways in which Britons saw and understood the manifestly unequal society in which they lived? For a suggestive answer, we might usefully turn to Montpellier in , when a bourgeois citizen set out to "put his world in order"by describing the social structure of his town.

He concluded that there was no single comprehensive or authoritative way in which this could be done. Instead, he offered three very different yet equally plausible accounts of the same contemporary social world.

The first was Montpellier as a procession: as a hierarchy on parade, a carefully graded ordering of rank and dignity, in which each layer melded and merged almost imperceptibly into the next. The second was Montpellier divided into three collective categories of modified estates: the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the common people. And the third was a more basic division: between those who were patricians and those who were plebeians.

Clearly, these were very different ways of characterizing and categorizing the same population. The first stressed the prestige ranking of individuals and the integrated nature of Montpellier society. The second placed people in discrete collective groups that owed more to wealth and occupation and gave particular attention to the bourgeoisie. And the third emphasized the adversarial nature of the social order by drawing one great divide on the basis of culture, style of life, and politics.

Thus Montpellier in , and thus Britain during the last three hundred years. That, in essence, is the argument that I advance and unfold in the following pages. When Britons have tried to make sense of the unequal social worlds they have inhabited, settled, and conquered, across the centuries and around the globe, they have most usually come up with versions or variants of these same three basic and enduring models: the hierarchical view of society as a seamless web; the triadic version with upper, middle, and lower collective groups; and the dichotomous, adversarial picture, where society is sundered between "us" and "them.

Strictly speaking, they were mutually exclusive, using different criteria to describe the same unequal society in very different ways and often though diminishingly using their own specific languages. Thus regarded, these three depictions of society do not amount to what the sociologist Gordon Marshall would call "a rigorously consistent interpretation of the world.

But in practice and like the Montpellier bourgeois, most people move easily and effortlessly from one model to another, recasting their vision of British society to suit their particular purpose or perspective.

And one of the reasons they were able to do so was that they gradually came to use the same language, regardless of the particular model they were employing. Often it was the vocabulary of ranks and orders. But it was also, and increasingly, the language of class that was most commonly used for describing all three models of contemporary British society: class as hierarchy; class as "upper," "middle," and "lower"; and class as just "upper" and "lower.

Nor is it the history of innumerable subjective social identities exclusively constituted by language. Rather, it is the history of the three different ways in which, across the centuries, most Britons have visualized their society: the history of three models of social description that are often but not always expressed in the language of class.

Redefined and understood in this way, the history of "class" should properly be regarded as the answer to the following question: how did and do Britons understand and describe their social worlds?

Stuart Hall, for example, noted in that Thatcherism "has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual 'logics' with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development" , The Iron Lady's ability to control the terms of debate was Use this link to get back to this page. Collectivism and Thatcher's "classless" society in British fiction and film.

Author: Mary McGlynn. Date: Sept. From: Twentieth Century Literature Vol. Publisher: Hofstra University. Class origins are important. But so are class destinations. In the context of stalled social mobility and increased inequality, selecting candidates who embody this journey and giving them prominence would allow Labour to both reconnect with its core constituency, and represent an aspirational narrative which may have wider resonance.

He tweets olhe. The working class has been split by the Labour Party into ethnic minority working class and white working class. The rise of the career politician means that M. It may well be that some wealthy M. The Labour Party needs representatives who can understand the problems of those who earn too little ever to be able to afford to buy a house but nonetheless need decent housing at a reasonable cost.

The country is losing valuable health workers who emmigrate for a better life. This Tory government is busy dismantling the NHS and underfunding Education — the prerequisite of social mobility.

Labour has to get real and reconnect with those who should be its natural supporters and stop being the proto Tory party of Tony Blair and his cronies.

The article seems seductively simple, but I disagree with it. The personal connection between voters and candidates is less now than it has ever been. Gone are the days of packed out public meetings where candidates could meet the public in their hundreds. In a world of insecure employment and social exclusion which the working class feel more than any other group, of course they will feel less inclined to vote. Even in the or so more marginal seats, the background of the candidate is less important now than the message, slickly delivered according to algorithms fed by data picked up in thirty second chats with activists on the doorstep.

As Edward Royle [3] points out: The middle class is a significant sector of society who makes up between one-fifth and one-third of the whole Royle Members of the middle class have a number of different functions in society. In recent social studies labour force has been distinguished in five social occupational groups, whereas in general the middle class is usually associated with non- manual work such as service workers in public administration, managers and shop- keepers.

Another way to describe the middle class is a characterisation with the help of special professions because middle class representatives usually work non- manually. Their status in the social hierarchy depends on income, wealth and public role. People belonging to the middle class are to different degrees conscious of their class and position in society. However, neither the definitions concerning typical middle class professions nor the demarcations towards the upper and lower classes are very clear.

At the lower end of the social scale it almost merges with the working class and at the upper end members of the middle class aspire acceptance into the upper class e. Royle Modern Britain. A Social History London: Arnold, Britain - A classless society? A R Anja Reiff Author. Add to cart. Table of Contents 1.