Understanding Class

Citation

Wright, E. O. (2015). Understanding Class. Verso.

Chapter Summary

The book runs to about 270 pages. Part 1 is titled "Frameworks of Class Analysis" and Part 2 "Class in the Twenty-First Century", which begins at page 111. Most chapters are devoted to one author's or one debate's treatment of class, and a closing chapter deals with class struggle and class compromise. An opening chapter precedes the first titled chapter at page 21, and the publisher describes the whole as an effort to develop "a more integrated framework of class analysis". The publisher's description sets out the route: Marx and Weber first, then Charles Tilly, Thomas Piketty, Guy Standing and others, and finally how class struggle and class compromise play out in contemporary society.

Opening chapter (pp. 1–20)

Wright published an essay with the book's title in New Left Review in 2009, in which he singles out three clusters of causal processes relevant to class: class as the attributes and material life conditions of individuals (the approach of stratification research), class as a matter of control over resources and the exclusion of others, called "opportunity hoarding" (the Weberian approach), and class as a structure of domination and exploitation (the Marxist approach). The framework the book promises is a way of holding these three together.

The Shadow of Exploitation in Weber's Class Analysis (p. 21)

The first titled chapter takes up Max Weber, whose class analysis is usually set against Marx's. The title indicates that the chapter looks for the influence of exploitation, a Marxist core concept, behind Weber's account.

Metatheoretical Foundations of Charles Tilly's Durable Inequality (p. 57)

A chapter on the metatheory of Tilly's book on durable inequality, whose categorical inequality and opportunity hoarding are both prominent in the book's index terms.

Class, Exploitation, and Economic Rents: Reflections on Sørensen's "Toward a Sounder Basis for Class Analysis" (p. 79)

Wright's reflections on Aage Sørensen's essay "Toward a Sounder Basis for Class Analysis", with exploitation and economic rents as the terms of the discussion.

Michael Mann's Two Frameworks of Class Analysis (p. 93)

A chapter on the two frameworks of class analysis in Michael Mann's work, the last chapter of the first part.

David Grusky and … (p. 113)

The first chapter of Part 2 is on David Grusky's work. "Micro-classes" appears among the book's frequent terms, which suggests the discussion concerns Grusky's disaggregated, occupation-based approach to class.

The Ambiguities of Class in Thomas Piketty's … (p. 127)

The title points to ambiguities in how Thomas Piketty's account of capital and inequality treats class.

The Death of Class Debate (p. 139)

The chapter takes up the claim, mentioned in the publisher's description, that class has lost its relevance, against the counter-claim that it remains central to contemporary capitalism.

Is the Precariat a Class? (p. 157)

A discussion of Guy Standing's proposal that the precariat is a new class, tested against Wright's concepts.

Beneficial for Whom? (p. 177)

A short chapter of about eight pages whose title poses a question.

Working Class Power, Capitalist Class Interests, and Class Compromise (p. 185)

At roughly 46 pages, the longest chapter listed. Its title joins working-class power, capitalist class interests and class compromise, and "positive class compromise" and "class associational power" are among the terms that recur through the book.

Class Struggle and Class Compromise in the Era … (p. 231)

The closing chapter, which the publisher summarises as examining how class struggle and class compromise play out in contemporary society.

Key Concepts

The book as a whole

• Class as several causal mechanisms: individual attributes and life conditions, opportunity hoarding, and domination and exploitation, associated with stratification research, Weberian and Marxist traditions respectively.
• Exploitation: the Marxist core idea that some people gain by controlling the labour of others; the book's first chapter asks how it shadows Weber's analysis.
• Durable inequality: Tilly's term for inequalities that persist across generations, examined in the second chapter.
• Economic rents: the concept at the centre of the Sørensen chapter.
• The precariat: the group around which Standing builds his argument, assessed in the chapter that asks whether it is a class.
• Class compromise: the settlement between workers' collective organisations and capital's interests that the closing chapters examine.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A single argument across several debates. The publisher presents the book as moving through Marx and Weber, Tilly, Piketty, Standing and others while building toward one integrated framework, so a reader gets a guided tour of the main competing positions rather than a survey that leaves them unreconciled.
• Engagement with named, current positions. Chapters are organised around identifiable authors and works (Weber, Tilly, Sørensen, Mann, Grusky, Piketty, Standing), which makes the debates easy to trace and to cite in a seminar paper.
• Reception. The publisher's page quotes Göran Therborn calling it a benchmark contribution to radical thinking and Michael Burawoy praising its combination of political imagination and analytical precision.

Limitations

• Organised around other authors' texts. Most chapters take a named author or work as their subject; a reader who has not met Weber, Marx or Tilly will need to read them alongside.
• Not a survey or a data book. There is no chapter on empirical findings about mobility, income or wealth, so it cannot replace a stratification textbook.
• A collection in structure. The chapter list reads as a series of essays on different authors rather than a cumulative argument built step by step, so the order is a guide, not a requirement.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the class and inequality list, this is the book that argues about how to think about class itself. Social Stratification and Inequality and Society are large readers that collect classic and recent writing from several disciplines; Wright's book works as a companion, supplying one author's attempt to say how their rival perspectives relate. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality is a textbook that builds a model of the United States class structure from current data on jobs, wages and wealth, and gives the empirical side that Wright's chapters mostly leave aside. Social Class in the 21st Century is an accessible account of class in contemporary Britain based on the Great British Class Survey, and Unequal Childhoods is an ethnography of how class shapes family life; both show class as lived experience, while Wright concerns the concept.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who already know the basics of Marx's and Weber's class theories and want to decide which framework to use in a research project. Start with the opening chapter and the Weber chapter, then read the chapters that match the debate you need: Tilly and Sørensen for exploitation and rents, Mann and Grusky for rival frameworks, Piketty and the death-of-class chapter for current arguments, and the precariat chapter for a contemporary test case. Finish with the last two chapters for the political question of class compromise. Read the chapters on authors you have not met alongside the works they discuss, and use a stratification reader to supply the empirical material the book assumes.