How Important is Social Class?
Wrong, Dennis H.
The old question of why there has been no socialism in the United States has often been answered by referring to the racial, ethnic, and religious divisions within the ranks of labor— which...
...The gradualist view of poverty as confined to "pockets," destined to be wiped out in the course of continued economic growth, no longer seemed plausible...
...Glazer and Moynihan suggest that ethnic identities have taken over some of the task in self-definition and in definition by othersthat occupational identities, particularly workingclass identities, have generally played...
...And many of them have, as a result, adopted a newly sympathetic attitude toward the American workers' ethnicities...
...But in America groups other than classes have played an intermediate role between the family and the total society, protecting the individual from anomie...
...Accordingly, the American Left has been impatient with the ethnic loyalties and animosities of American workers, seeing them as fossilized survivals that retard the growth of class consciousness...
...Radicals have charged the ruling classes with deliberately fomenting racial and religious prejudice as part of a divide-and-rule strategy...
...Except perhaps for a few brief moments in the 1930s and in particular regions or industries, the American working class has not conformed to the Marxist model...
...Why should it be any less of a danger where the group pride of working-class "white ethnics" is involved...
...Neither the alternative subcultural nor the unequal life-chance views conceive of classes as sharply defined groups inspiring intense loyalties and becoming the focus of self-consciously affirmed identities...
...A smaller number argued that ethnic differences had far from disappeared...
...HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS...
...Robert Jay Lifton, History and Human Survival (New York: Random House, 1970), chap...
...In a review Harold Wilensky argued that since Berger's community was only two years old at the time of the study, he had not given its residents sufficient time to develop such suburban middle-class patterns as the Ka)Jee Klatsch among wives, joining voluntary associations, becoming active in the church and PTA, reading consumer-oriented magazines, and raising their aspirations for their children...
...Class Suburb, in the American Sociological Review, April 1961, pp...
...Wilensky's later statement, however, downgrades the significance of class as such...
...98-99...
...Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Gerhard Lenski's The Religious Factor were the two most impressive books representing these tendencies...
...But the end ofmass immigration from Europe may promotethe development of an indigenous white workingclass culture in the United States in thenear future...
...Frank Tannenbaum's A Philosophy of Labor 13 is one of the very few efforts by an American to present trade unions as Gemeinschaf ten, protecting their members against the impersonal forces of industrial society rather than as limited economic-interest organizations...
...Rather, classes are groups whose members' aspirations and opportunities, beliefs and life-styles—far from reflecting a coherent self-sustaining culture or subculture—are basically shaped by their market position in the national economy, and, to use a formulation of Max Weber's, by their differential "life-chances" in the commodity, credit, and labor markets...
...College youth may have been attracted to the New Left and the counter culture...
...As if in response, the erosion of familiar moral landmarks has evoked self-conscious reaffirmations of traditional ethnic, religious, and territorial ties...
...Yet the most scrupulous, perceptive sociological studies of different segments of American society give rise to disagreements as to exactly which group memberships or cultural identities account for the attitudes and lifestyles that even their critics concede they accurately describe...
...In a review of the book Peter Rossi, one of the few leading American sociologists of Italian American origin, demurred...
...In the 1950s, religious identifications were thought to be acquiring new significance in an emerging "mass society" in which even objective class inequalities were supposed to be diminishing...
...12 Stanislaw Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness (New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1963...
...These attitudes now have been modified by what Andrew Greeley has called "the legitimation of ethnic self-consciousness...
...Essentially, they stress the role of economic inequalities in shaping people's aspirations and outlooks...
...14 New York: Oxford University Press, 1964...
...Twenty years ago, it was the other way around.17 Such an emphasis on ethnicity rather than class or occupation reflects a general shift away from work identities and the workplace, which now has been noted in a variety of contexts for two decades...
...York: Harper & Row, 1968...
...is For a brief summary of the evidence, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, "The NonGeneration Gap," Commentary, August 1970, pp...
...Sociologists have contended that strong social bonds and identities based on religion, ethnicity, locality, and occupation have persisted or developed in Amer 11 However hard-headed corporate elites may havebeen in protecting and advancing their own interests, even in the 1930s the claim by upper-classconservatives that FDR was "a traitor to his class" had a forced, anachronistic ring...
...Most American sociologists have favored a noneconomic conception of "social class," defining classes as aggregates of persons or families differing in values and behavior and forming a rank order of status levels...
...I also share Greeley's distaste for rootless "technological man" and for Warren Bennis's "temporary society," as well as for Robert Jay Lifton's "protean man"— and, more recently, for the ambivalent account by Greeley's fellow Irishman, William Irwin Thompson, of the "Los Angelization of America...
...One may readily agree with Andrew Greeley that ethnic groups are not merely a cover for white racism, that they provide emotional support and prideful identities to their members, are a valuable source of diversity within American society, and that their legitimation need not result in the kind of divisiveness that prevents multiethnic coalitions in support of broad social goals...
...282 DENNIS H. WRONG a response to this situation...
...A religious revival was widely proclaimed, and some survey researchers claimed that "religious affiliation" was becoming the crucial "variable," supplanting class, ethnicity, and rural-urban residence in accounting for surviving differences in behavior within an increasingly homogenized society...
...Granted that urban man needed something to provide him with somesort of identification between his family andthe impersonal metropolis, why did he stickwith the ethnic group when there were othergroupings to which he could make a strongemotional commitment...
...358-64...
...but sociologists, sometimes out of a polemical desire to refute prevailing scholarly or popular stereotypes, often stress the primacy of one set of social or cultural determinants over others...
...HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS...
...These polar outlooks attract, nevertheless, minorities: most young people continue to divide on political and social issues along the same economic and educational lines as their parents...
...8 Wilensky also claimed that Ber 7 Bennett Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 95...
...But even Nathan Glazer, who had insisted for years on the neglected and often subterranean influence of ethnic ties in American life, recently conceded in his introduction to a new edition of Beyond the Melting Pot that he and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had underestimated the durability of ethnicity in 1963, when they had concluded the first edition with the sentence "religion and race define the next stage in the evolution of the American peoples...
...One negative counterpart of close-knit group ties, and the support they provide for the individual, has been the stifling of impulses to freedom, self-determination, and striking out on new paths...
...Although it was recognized that economic and ethnic segregation was maintained and even increased in the suburbs, suburbia was seen primarily as a new and relatively classless way of life, supplanting the old ethnic urban neighborhoods...
...Even where this is avoided, the precise way in which age, generation, class, religion, ethnicity, race, and residence interact to produce a subcultural profile poses a difficult problem of analysis...
...The studies of W. L. Warner and his associates in the 1930s and 1940s were pioneering examples...
...2. 22 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 328...
...When, for example, do I choose, explicitly or implicitly, to define myself as Irish, when as Catholic, when as Irish Catholic, when as an academic, when a Chicagoan, when asan American...
...HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS...
...Having written off the working class and its unions as a force for major change, the New Left is prone to dismiss the stirrings of ethnic awareness among blue collar workers as no more than tokens of the incurable racism of the American society...
...1 Sociologists and a host of popular social critics who exaggerated and oversimplified their conclusions called attention in the 1950s to new forms of community life in the expanding suburbs...
...cit., pp...
...The life-styles of ghetto blacks living on welfare in matrifocal families have often enough been held up by white liberals as models for emulation...
...asa result, apparently, the status of being anethnic, a member of an ethnic group, has beenupgraded...
...But he fails to distinguish between politically militant class consciousness in the Marxist sense and the more common emphasis in American sociology on class as the shaper of life-styles and the source of a diffuse "consciousness of kind" that is hardly the same thing as Marxist class consciousness...
...19 Both critiques emphasized 17 Glazer and Moynihan, op...
...And he answers in the negative—which should be sufficient to dispose of "socialism in one community" as a primary objective in itself.ls Recently, the assertion of a "generation gap," in which age and generation are regarded as crucial bases of identity and group allegiance, has been subjected to criticism that in many ways resembles the earlier debunking of the suburban myth...
...1. 284 DENNIS H. WRONG Despite the familiar claim that the ethnic diversity of the American labor force was a barrier to the birth of a powerful socialist movement, it is worth recalling that immigrant groups constituted the bulk of the membership of the newly created Communist party—or parties—after World War I.21 Even 53 percent of the membership of the indigenous Socialist party was foreign-born by 1920.22 The core of the New Deal coalition is usually described as consisting of labor and the urban minorities, although, to a considerable degree, these two groups contained the same people...
...Like Gans in The Urban Villagers, Berger argued that his subjects embodied an "incipient native white working-class culture" destined to replace older ethnic cultures, although in contrast to Gans the main thrust of his argument was directed against the claims of suburban residence rather than of ethnicity as a shaper of life-styles...
...Most of the commentary on suburbia was derisive in tone, and by the early '60s many sociologists were refuting negative stereotypes that had often originated in popularizations of earlier studies by their colleagues...
...The reason, of course, was the black revolution and the rediscovery of poverty...
...381-82...
...The sociologist Herbert Gans has insisted on the primacy of class, viewed as the resultant of income and educational and occupational opportunities, in shaping group values and behavior...
...20 20 Greeley, op, cit., pp...
...Ourimages of working-class life, consequently, aredominated by ethnic motifs...
...but, it is pointed out, George Wallace also drew disproportionate support in 1968 from working-class and lower-middle-class youth...
...The concept of class has been used with reference to American life in three distinct ways...
...Nearly a century later, such European theorists of "mass society" as Emil Lederer and Hannah Arendt held that the decline and breakup of social classes under the impact of war, inflation, and depression had produced a spiritual homelessness conducive to the rise of totalitarian movements that adopted slogans promising the restoration of brotherhood and community...
...Even New Left radicals have argued that "the community" (the inner-city community, or ghetto) rather than the factory is now the major locus of social conflict...
...The restless hunger of many young people for new ideals and new forms of group life has obviously been influential out of proportion to the numbers involved...
...Nor did the comfortable liberal notion that the elimination of racial discrimination constituted the "unfinished business of American democracy," bound to be achieved painlessly within a few decades...
...There has never developed here a network of working-class interest associations and trade-union or partycreated institutions sufficiently far-flung and powerful to constitute a distinctive subculture resembling the "nation within a nation" formed around the SPD in Imperial Germany.'° The distinctive working-class way of life and "wethem" consciousness described by such English writers as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson has scarcely even been present in America...
...To a degree this is, as I have already noted, a matter of appearance encouraged by fashions in sociological theorizing and the nervous faddishness of the media...
...He invoked "memories of my childhood and adolescence in New York City during the twenties and thirties" to argue that "there is much more characteristically Italian (or perhaps more generally Latin) in the social organization of the West End than Gans would have the reader believe...
...But these partial exceptions either exclude the vast majority of Americans or confine, in Stanislaw Ossowski's phrase, "class structure in the social consciousness" to the local community.12 This is significant because it means that class fails to lend itself to the interpretation most favored by American sociologists to account for both changing and constant group loyalties and the process of identity-formation in America: what might be called the "protectionagainstanomie" theory...
...The likelihood of purely symbolic gains and "tokenism" seems somewhat greater than that white ethnic feelings will take an ugly racist turn and provide the basis for a fascist movement, although that possibility cannot be dismissed should American society face acute disaster...
...z For a summary of this debate, see Dennis H. Wrong, "Suburbs and Myths of Suburbia," in Wrong and Harry L. Gracey, eds., Readings in Introductory Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp...
...Today "white ethnics" and "blue-collar workers"—when not the invidious "hard hats"—are terms often used interchangeably, each serving as a euphemism for the other in different contexts...
...Wilensky correctly questions the importance of this kind of "class consciousness" in the United States today and even in the past...
...First, there is the Marxist model of classes as rival groups organized and mobilized for conflict arising out of clashing economic interests...
...I shall give several illustrations of such controversies that arise out of the interpretation of the findings of some of the more influential recent sociological studies, stressing those bearing on class and ethnicity...
...But the mass media, with their voracious appetite for novelty, pick up and publicize each new group that comes into focus, enhancing the impression of discontinuity and casting into outer darkness the "Other Americas" or "forgotten men" or "silent majorities," who then have to be "rediscovered" when the currently fashionable group has been overexposed...
...1s Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 133...
...1e 15 Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...It described, unlike The Levittowners, a purely working-class planned development in San Jose, California...
...Such anthropological romanticism is unlikely to promote the kind of social change needed to eliminate ghettos, poverty, and racial discrimination...
...Obviously, the new assertiveness of blacks and the adoption of separatist slogans by some black militants have provided the occasion for a newly selfconscious and unapologetic ethnicity among whites...
...6 New York: Pantheon Books, 1967...
...By the end of the '60s the student and youth revolts and the emergence of a new feminist movement had added age, generation, and sex to the list of major group identifications seen as shaping values in America...
...Sociological research, to be sure, reveals the multiple affiliations and identities of its subjects...
...283 the persistence of class differences within, respectively, the younger generation and suburbia...
...is Ibid., p. 86...
...Yet this cannot be dismissed, as it so often is, as a mere cover for racism...
...310-12...
...Less politically committed social analysts also have tended to minimize the role of ethnic groups in American society, seeing them as destined to disappear within a few generations...
...5 From Peter Rossi's review of The Urban Villagers, in the American Journal of Sociology, November 1964, pp...
...This danger has often been pointed out in connection with black-studies programs, courses in Swahili, and plans to encourage "black capitalism" in the ghettos...
...15 Why, moreover, do different groups— churches, suburban communities, ethnic groups —appear to succeed one another as centers of "belongingness...
...Sociologists have used the protection-againstanomie theory to account for everything from rises in the birth rate to the appeal of fanatical ideological movements...
...The "quest for community" as a reaction to the forces promoting anomie—whether these forces are primarily identified with capitalist market relations, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, or all of these together—has long been a major theme of sociological thought going back to 19th-century thinkers, in particular to Durkheim and Tonnes...
...that much behavior and many attitudes said to be rooted in class areinstead a matter of race, religion, ethnic origin, education, age, and stage in the familylife cycle...
...Yet liberal pluralists have argued that multiple loyalties to class and interest organizations, nationality groups, and churches have enabled the United States to maintain a stable yet flexible social order, and to avoid those bitter conflicts in which class, ethnic, and religious divisions are superimposed upon one another...
...that a clearly defined working class no longerexists, if it ever did...
...3 1 Gerhard Lenski, "The Religious Factor in Detroit: Revisited," American Sociological Review, February 1971, p. 50...
...The revival of ethnic sentiments, therefore, need not be an obstacle to a coalition politics working through the Democratic party for reforms...
...Moreover, the facts of color, marginal occupations (largely not unionized), and ghetto residence are likely to sustainthe ethnicity of these groups for the foreseeablefuture and isolate them from the native, white working-class culture apparently incipient in the San Jose suburb...
...Why," Andrew Greeley asks, was not social class the membership aroundwhich American city dwellers could rally, asit was in England...
...But recognition of the reality and the value of ethnic groups is no substitute for improving the school systems, reforming the tax structure, providing better housing, cleaning up the cities, and, in general, redistributing the good things of life in a way that will both increase the opportunities for individuals to escape from their ethnic communities, if they so wish, and improve the levels and quality of living in the ethnic communities themselves...
...35-39...
...In the early 60s, attention shifted from religion and suburbia back to the inner city and, to a lesser extent, to the rural and small-town South and the border-state region...
...Gans's first book was The Urban Villagers, 4 a study of an Italian community in the West End of Boston, which was influential in mobilizing liberal intellectuals against urban renewal projects that destroyed cohesive neighborhoods...
...One does not have to choose between extolling the new ethnicity, on the one hand, and ignoring or even deploring it, on the other...
...Most research on class in American communities has employed, at least implicitly, this view of classes as ranked subcultures...
...The fierce peer-group loyalties —often affirmed as "generational" solidarity— of the young, the appeal of communes, and the new popularity of encounter and sensitivitytraining groups, all are recent phenomena readily explained in these terms...
...e From Harold Wilensky's review of Working...
...Why have the trade unionsrarely, if ever, played quite the fraternal rolein American society that they have in manycontinental societies...
...If ethnic groups have often, as Greeley acknowledges, been a "mobility trap" for their members, may not heightened ethnic solidarity lead to an even greater sense of imprisonment for working-class boys and, especially, girls, who have become aware in recent years of new options in life-styles and career patterns and a more permissive hedonist ethos...
...But they have looked with disfavor upon the revival of ethnic sentiments among whites—seeing them, not inaccurately, as a response to the new black militancy...
...this has, of course, happened often in the troubled course of modem history...
...2 Some stressed the persistence of class differences, even in suburbia itself, as against the view of a standardized suburban life-style embracing almost everyone...
...De Tocqueville was the first to suggest that the leveling of class distinctions in the United States created the risk of an atomized, anonymous society, threatened by the "tyranny of the majority," and he saw the American predilection for forming voluntary associations as is New York: Knopf, 1951...
...Wilensky concluded of Berger's community that "it looks like a suburban variant of lower-middle class culture...
...the blue-collar work force is likely to remain at between 20 and 25 millionfor some time to come, and it is extremelydoubtful that Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes will constitute the major part of thisindustrial labor force...
...But the influence of class on conduct in America cannot be understood in terms of this theory, for neither classes nor associations based explicitly on class bonds and interests have been recognized objects of loyalty or membership groups with which people could proudly identify...
...been the Democratic party and the union movement at home...
...Racial discrimination and economic deprivation, victimizing a sizable minority of the total population, seemed more significant than the largely symbolic religious and intra-middle class differences stressed in the previous decade...
...xxxiv-xxxv...
...Both radicals and liberals have joined in deploring the race consciousness of American workers, who have so often excluded Negroes, Orientals, and Mexican Americans from their organizations, thus subjecting these groups to relatively unrestrained exploitation...
...Gans has also been a major critic of the notion that there is an at least semiautonomous "culture of poverty," insisting that the behavior of the 4 New York, Macmillan Free Press, 1962...
...280 DENNIS H. WRONG ger's own evidence suggested that some of these patterns were beginning to appear, although they had not been present in the grimy industrial slum Berger's respondents had inhabited before moving to the suburb...
...Lenski, however, has recently conceded that .. The Religious ". Factor is, at best, a picture of an era that has ended...
...William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), chap...
...Gans insisted that his subjects' way of life reflected a generic working class rather than a specifically Italian American subculture, pointing to patterns of family structure, sex role and courtship practices, and other values that West Enders shared with a wide variety of ethnically different working-class communities, including the culturally homogeneous British working class...
...12-28...
...either Gans or Berger to suburban residence as producing at least a "variant" of lowermiddleclass culture...
...It has been the special merit of such sociologists as Herbert Gans and S. M. Miller to remind us of the continuing, pervasive influence of economic forces at the national level...
...Berger's interpretation of his own evidence did not pass unchallenged...
...People define themselves, Gordon maintains, primarily as upper-middle-class Jews, working-class Poles, or lower-class blacks rather than by class or ethnic origin alone...
...Religious organizations were seen as replacing the old ethnic associations founded by immigrants in providing individuals with secure group membership and social and emotional support as a protection against the impersonality of the larger society...
...a In a later study of a planned suburban community in the Philadelphia area, The Levittowners, 6 Herbert Gans attacked the "myth of suburbia," arguing that the move to the suburbs had not fundamentally changed class-determined life-styles and that the major conflicts in the multi-class community he studied arose out of clashes between upper-middle-class, on the one hand, and lower-middle and workingclass values and interests, on the other...
...Both ideological orientations— the emphasis of the New Left on racial pride and Third World nationalism, and older leftists' acceptance of the American working class in its full concreteness—have aroused new interest in the tangled web of class and ethnic identifications in American society...
...True, such analysts as Veblen, the Lynds, Mills, and, more recently, G. William Domhoff have imputed at least a modified form of Marxist class consciousness to American upper or "ruling" classes...
...The important question is, rather, under what sets of circumstances, which kinds of people find what sources of self-definition pertinent...
...to Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1963...
...New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), p. 40...
...Insofar as class categories remain at all useful, the line that divides stably employed, welleducated, well-paid workers from the lowerclass is becoming more important than thesplit between upper working class and lowermiddle class.9 The Gans-Rossi difference was over the relative importance of class as against ethnicity, but Berger and Wilensky disagreed over whether there are distinct lower-middle and workingclass subcultures, although Wilensky was evidently inclined to attach more importance than a Harold Wilensky, "Class, Class Consciousnessand American Workers," in William Haber, ed., Labor in a Changing America (New York: BasicBooks, 1966), pp...
...Member of the community" and "community control" have acquired in much radical rhetoric the aura that once attached to "worker" and "workers' control...
...In a later publication, Wilensky forcefully generalized his viewpoint, maintaining that . . . in the United States and in other rich countries, class consciousness among manualworkers is a transitional phenomenon characterizing workers not yet accustomed to themodern metropolis and the modern work place...
...New Left radicals and those liberals influenced by them have supported the growing ethnic solidarity of blacks, Chicanos, and American Indians...
...The old question of why there has been no socialism in the United States has often been answered by referring to the racial, ethnic, and religious divisions within the ranks of labor— which are the result of successive waves of overseas immigration and the partial incorporation into the labor force of the rural blacks...
...Older socialists, though they have abandoned the millennial expectations of classical Marxism, have retained their attachment to the proletariat, accepting it as it is, "warts and all," as a force for peaceful democratic change...
...Thestatus of the worker has been downgraded...
...But what, then, of the current "resurgence of ethnicity," noted by such sociologists as Greeley himself, Glazer and Moynihan, and increasingly publicized by the media...
...Are we to extend it to white ethnic groups, celebrate the cultural diversity of American society—and ignore its persisting economic injustices and the continuing arbitrary authority to which workers, both black and white, are subject on the job...
...Yet much as it has contributed to our understanding of the stresses of contemporary life, the emphasis of sociological perspective on anomie and "alienation," "the quest for community," "identity crisis," and "the need for participation" tends to lead to a relative neglect of the importance of the economic, of inequality in income and opportunity, as major determinants of the fate of individuals and groups...
...HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS...
...The muchcriticized idea of a "culture of poverty" doubtless initially caught on so quickly because it was consistent with this approach...
...and critics of the violence, family instability, lack of achievement orientation, and the many physical and mental pathologies prevalent in the black underclass have been accused of being "hung up on middle-class values...
...Christopher Lasch, a spokesman for this outlook, has advocated "building socialism" in the ghetto, although in his critique of black nationalism he asks, "Would self-determination for the ghetto threaten General Motors...
...And some versions of the subcultural model have pictured classes as membership groups creating strong identifications, at least at the local community level...
...If the Church of England, as the old saw has it, is the Tory party at prayer, it has been almost as true that America's white ethnic groups have 21 Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), chap...
...But even Tannenbaum was suggesting a potential role rather than describing an actual one...
...so it hardly suffices to explain why particular groups become major carriers of identity...
...Warren Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society (New It remains all too possible that the new positive valuation of ethnicity could become a matter of purely symbolic concessions, diverting attention away from the need for egalitarian economic reforms...
...Today, it may be better to bean Italian than a worker...
...3 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Introduction to the Second Edition: New York City in 1970," Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), pp, vii—viii...
...poor is essentially a response to economic deprivation and lack of opportunity...
...281 However, when such sociologists as Herbert Gans and Bennett Berger insist on the importance of class in American life, they suggest a third conception...
...Bennett Berger's Working-Class Suburb was an earlier study attacking the suburban myth...
...Milton Gordon in his Assimilation in American Life 14 argues that the combination of ethnic origin and class position has produced a group or collectivity he calls an "ethclass," and that this is the largest "reference group" with which Americans feel a positive sense of identification...
...Clearly, the shifts in the attention of social analysts from class to religious and residential, race, sex, and generational divisions reflect real discontinuities in the recent development of American society...
...As Greeley observes, The relevant issue for social research is not whether one [means of self-definition] replacesthe other or even whether these factors are being replaced by yet another means of selfdefinition...
...It was thought to represent the future to which surviving working-class, lowerclass, and ethnic subcultures would eventually succumb under the impact of continuing prosperity...
...Classes in this view are neither solidary groups mobilized for social conflict nor more diffuse groups sharing a common life-style and status pride...
...We have no clear images of American `working-class style,' " Berger wrote, precisely because the lowest positions on oursocioeconomic ladder were traditionally occupied by the most recent groups of Europeanimmigrants, each of which, as they arrived, pushed earlier groups of immigrants up...
...ica because they provide emotional security and a sense of community in face of the impersonality and rapid social change of the larger society...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
