BOOKS
Manners, Robert & Glixon, Niel
CLASS, STATUS AND POWER: A READER IN SOCIAL STRATIFICATION. Edited by Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Lipset. The Free Press. Glencoe, Illinois. 725 pp. $6. Though designed as a college...
...Niel Glixon RECENT BOOKS RECEIVED INTERRELATIONS OF CULTURES, a. volume in the Collection of Intercultural Studies published by the United Nations, UNESCO, 387 pages, $2.00...
...The second reason is that the failure to distinguish adequately between the concepts of class an sich and class fur sich which is demonstrated iq the Bendix-Lipset essay leads to conceptual and theoretical formulations of a dubious nature...
...It is not Marx' prescience with which we are concerned, nor is it even the correctness of his non-predictive formulations...
...The matter is really a simple one: Mr...
...And if individuals so differentiated be defined as members of social classes, then these, too, become inevitable, and classless societies thereby impossible...
...That is because he thinks in terms of the whole spirit of the age, seeing it as caught in an insatiable will for change and extremity, in place of skepticism and moderation...
...But that is not the point at issue...
...ONE OTHER POINT...
...Under three major headings (theories of social stratification...
...The psychopathology of everyday life, if you will...
...and those concerned with socio-psychological phenomena and who see class as coming into existence only with self-consciousness...
...One might suggest that Page could regain his composure if he desisted in his "squaring" efforts...
...Which is to say it covers effects rather than causes...
...Recognizing that there is always an important overlap between the two, Weber does not, however—as do so many others—hold for the identity of the two groupings...
...research on the problem in other countries) the editors present selections from about sixty authors, ranging from Aristotle to Lloyd Warner...
...It is independent of self-identification or awareness...
...Humor itself, like many of our social gestures, has become a "national front," a public-relations device for disguising our bad behavior, both from ourselves and our victims...
...THE SECOND AND THIRD PARTS of the volume, those which concern themselves primarily with empirical materials on class and status phenomena in America and elsewhere, comprise the greatest part of the total...
...For who would dare deny that prestige or esteem differences are an inevitable attribute of any social system...
...Obviously the author is less interested in presenting "a survey of an age" than in spelling out the terms of his recoil...
...The colonists, and the early citizens of the United States, often wrote of their devotion to this extraordinary place in ways quite distinct from the national devotional literature of other nations...
...In this struggle . . . this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself...
...Classes are related to the production and acquisition of goods while status groups are characterized by consumption...
...The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests...
...But some general comments may be relevant...
...Certainly Marx' own prognostications based on his view of class and the nature of class struggle have not proved altogether accurate...
...Opponents of change will welcome those researches and concepts which identify status and prestige with class...
...In extenuation of the preceding strictures it should be pointed out that a passage from the "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" does indeed suggest a change in the character of classes which follows directly from activity for political ends...
...The effect is of autobiography masking as cultural analysis, very nearly the reverse of "The Education...
...From Marx: "Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers...
...and everyday effects, not large ones, vaguely conceived...
...Rather it is with the accuracy of his interpreters and critics, and the consequences of their interpretations for an understanding of social structure and the possibilities of social action...
...Here man is free as he ought to be" ; and all at once we are in the familiar and dismaying realm of the self-hypnotized publicist...
...the coarsening of behavior...
...The study of attitudes is clearly a legitimate area of inquiry...
...IN A LONG QUOTATION from "German Ideology" the authors include Marx' assertion that "the class...
...If "membership" in a class be seen as deriving primarily—even if not always— from such concrete, objective factors as one's position in the productive system, the twin phantoms of self-identification and social status as the sine qua non of class may be exorcised, even while we recognize that identification may be strong, that there may be statusprestige correlates, and that the individuals may in many cases consciously identify their interest with those of a class to which they do not "belong...
...For Adams and De Tocqueville, their methods were not merely literary devices...
...the usual province of the realistic novelist...
...Kronenberger's slight disaffection for the apocalyptic Melvilles, Dostoyevskys, and Lawrences derives precisely from his rational but somewhat anemic conception of the range of human experience...
...I would like to add one thing more...
...He perceives more subtly, than any newspaper critic the corruption of a theatre in which nearly nothing is produced that hasn't been "angled," "slicked," and "gimmicked" to make it a hit...
...rather, both concepts are abstractions from concrete reality, and the failure to treat them as such may lead to reifiction or a sterile circular reasoning...
...It would have been an outright contradiction of Marx' basic philosophic position to have said, in effect, that it is the consciousness of class which calls it into existence...
...But what is even more significant is the fact that an individual's position in the social structure exists in spite of his feelings about it or about anything else...
...He would like to disentangle the real from our corrupt persuasions concerning it...
...If the one followed neatly from the other, class and class-consciousness would indeed be identical and simultaneous inorigin...
...But even if they mean by "development," a process of evolving ultimately to a condition where the class assumes its self-conscious role in the struggle for social transformation, they are still guilty of obfuscation...
...From within it he is able to perceive much, startlingly much that has escaped other observers...
...It is what crosses your mind when you say hello that strikes Mr...
...And again: "But the existence of common conditions and the realization of common interests are in turn only the necessary, not the sufficient bases for the development of a social class...
...But while one's attitudes may be the consequence of multiple determinants, one's position in the productive framework is...
...And 292 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 this position has certain inevitable correlates...
...Thus, while nearly every chapter in the second half of the volume opens with a great profession of impartiality and good feeling, this tone always vanishes within two pages...
...COMPANY MANNERS, by Louis Kronenberger...
...Attitudes are assailed, molded, coerced and even created by a host of other influences than one's relations to the instruments of production...
...UNDER MILK WOOD, by Dylan Thomas...
...Kronenberger gets to "the decline of sensibility" he hits where it hurts most...
...and so on...
...The selection by Charles Page on "Social Class and American Sociology" illustrates this point perhaps more clearly...
...Though designed as a college text, this book is so excellently done that it will interest many people outside the academy...
...This is why there has recently been a fashionable resurgence of the frontier view that America is essentially a classless society, a jig-saw picture of differently-shaded, perhaps differently-shaped particles, all of which are not only essential to creation of the whole pattern but which also lie flatly and evenly interlocked on the level surface that is American social structure...
...It already is...
...Subjective awareness of class interests was in his view an indispensable element in the development of a social class...
...Kronenberger, on the other hand, a reader frequently has the sense that all "Company Manners" records is an affront to the author's taste...
...Kronenberger's substituting a series of sharp impressions for some formulated or implicit historical vision if he could manage it in the way, to take a different sort of example, that D. H. Lawrence does in the "Studies in Classic American Literature," with his dark predictions of psychic and social upheaval...
...Kronenberger's frame of reference...
...The contrast would be a joke if it were not that we face the consequences of that joke every day...
...We lack realism drastically, fatally," he says, and for a man whose vocabulary is conservative, that's strong language...
...Nevertheless it is usually made to appear as if this is exactly what he did say or imply...
...About these he inquires, aside from their own personal attributes, to what degree they encourage in others the virtues he admires: independence, individualism, skepticism, the relaxed will...
...It is always socially significant, and an understanding of its consequences is crucial to an understanding of the dynamics of culture in any society...
...Men are the same in all ages and in all countries...
...Hammerstein has raised the libretto a notch or two above its traditionally ghastly level, has brought it to about the level ofwomen's magazine fiction or B movies...
...Kronenberger into all kinds of difficulty...
...It's another way of getting rid of the distasteful facts of class...
...When one has exorcised classes or denied their reality, either by making their existence contingent upon awareness or by stressing obvious facts of social mobility, one has thereby exorcised also the significance of class conflict as a factor in social relations and social change...
...In this currently popular view, society is seen as a web of interacting and mutually benefiting status groups, each of which is functionally dependent upon the others for the greatest welfare of all...
...One need not recognize one's position in the structure in order to be involved with these correlates, any more than one need recognize the existence or the role of pneumoccocus in order to be carried off by that disease or to be saved by several shots of the correct antibiotic...
...In one camp are the men who play the roles of prophet, teacher, moralist, martyr, saint, sinner, seer—the Melvilles, Nietzsches, Kierkegaards, the Gides, Dostoyevskys, D. H. Lawernces...
...That they are not is significant, of course...
...Bobbs-Merrill Indianapolis and New York, 1954...
...A new arrival, wrote Crevecoeur in the 1770's, "is arrived in a new continent...
...achieves an in dependent existence over and against the individuals, so that the latter find their condition of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it...
...Henry Adams did it as pseudo-autobiography with all the aspects of our culture examined for their use as education to a man facing the twentieth century...
...But soon the gratitude becomes intemperate...
...It is not that we sell out, says he, so much as that we convince ourselves we haven't...
...The existence of classes as concrete entities is determined by their members' position in the productive scheme of a 290 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 given society...
...Whatever may be said for taste as a guide to the arts, it is bound to falter as a guide to the spirit of an age...
...And we begin to understand Mr...
...Max Weber in his essay, "Class, Status and Party," which the editors have reprinted, points up a distinction between "status groups" and "classes...
...This is not to say that contemporary theories of class must or should be evaluated by the degree to which they accord with or differ from Marx' formulations...
...Page identifies two schools of class theorists: those concerned with class as a socio-economic aggregate, whom he equates with Marxism...
...Emphasis in original...
...Crevecoeur himself paid the penalty of his over-estimate...
...And despite the general lucidity of their presentation and the depth of their understanding, Bendix and Lipset have—because they, too, fail todistinguish clearly between the class in itself and the class for itself— committed the same errors of analysis...
...and certainly no reason why the treatment of them as such must lead to "sterile circular reasoning...
...Read: "For it's not only that the third-rate is so mechanical, meretricious and shallow as to stand selfexposed ; it's that the second-rate is gratefully regarded as a corrective...
...IN THE MINDS OF MEN, by Gardner Murphy...
...It is obviously impossible to discuss even a few of the essays in any detail in the space available...
...Kronenberger characterizes our time, borrowing Auden's phrase, as an Age of Anxiety, and also, coining one of his own, as an Age of Publicity...
...In places like this the book's function of focusing on reality is most evident...
...and a few paragraphs later Crevecoeur is writing: "We are the most perfect society now existing in the world...
...Company Manners" covers: Americans as "not an artistic people" ; Broadway's gimmicked theatre...
...In common with most critics of Marx' analysis of class, the authors of this essay have elided the crucial distinction which Marx makes between class an sich and class fur sich, a distinction which Marx clearly drew between the objective class, i.e., the societal group whose situation is automatically defined by its relationship to the instruments of production, and the class so delimited which has become conscious of its identity and its role in the struggle either to preserve the existing social order or to change it...
...In this connection he sets up an inter esting dichotomy among writers...
...De Tocqueville saw it all as an object lesson in democracy to a world pregnant with democracy...
...and that is that the huge body of research which has been devoted to analysis of status or prestige—and which is treated in many articles in the Bendix-Lipset collection— is unlikely to yield significant insights into social conflict and change so long as its practitioners continue to stress these stratification features in isolation, or so long as they inaccurately attribute to them profound dynamic concomitants...
...It is diffiSummer 1954 • DISSENT • 295 cult to imagine a more thorougi destruction of the claims of the mediocre...
...What a long time it has taken for someone to say that...
...But we know too much about the abysses of spiritual and political existence to accept as adequate the Kronenberger formulation: " . . . The climate I desiderate is no more than a salubrious, breeze-swept temperate zone...
...Only simplistic determinists could assert otherwise...
...He perceives that the enthusiasm some classes show for museums does not reflect an artistic culture, any more than a Society for the Preservation of Folklore reflects a thriving folk tradition...
...It is a splendid effort, but it does not remove one's wish that those final entries in Volume III of "Capital" had been expanded into a full-scale discussion of class...
...a real appreciation is transformed into an emotional diversion from reality...
...But the class an sich does not depend for its existence upon the birth of this collective consciousness...
...Thus the many prestige and status ranking studies which divide communities into varying numbers of "classes" merely confound the analytic significance of the term as a clue to understanding certain on-going stresses in contemporary capitalist society...
...I don't want to digest "Company Manners" here, I want to recommend it...
...for while the events recounted were historical, the book was historic: it aimed to "make" history...
...THE ASSERTION THAT MARX was all wrong because class-consciousness and the consequent social revolution which he predicted appear about as remote as ever, implies that he was wrong also in his views concerning the inevitably conflicting interests of the owners and the producers in capitalist society...
...a universal necessity which calls forth stratification in any social system...
...It's not that, in a democracy, we have lost the restraints a class society imposes on manners — who wants them...
...And it is good to have it remorselessly labeled: mediocre...
...Kronenberger pitches his tent on just that ground, our need to face reality...
...But why should I wonder at this political phenomenon...
...And in that sense it impedes progress at least as much as it represents it...
...When Mr...
...television as a stupefying social phenomenon...
...This fundamentally subjective approach to his theme must get Mr...
...they swim in a sea of facile sentiment, glib idealism and humanitarian cliches...
...His estimates of the growth of self-consciousness, of the psychological and material consequences of advancing industrialization, and of the tendency to sharp polarization of society's producing and owning groups need serious recasting in the Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 291 light of trends manifest during the past 60 or 70 years...
...Adams really did feel that his culture had let him down, as compared with the ideal culture he believed he'd found in the Middle Ages...
...The genre of cultural criticism is after all not new...
...It's that contempt for them has bred familiarity...
...Over against them he places the old humanists: Socrates, Montaigne, Erasmus, Hume, E. M. Forster...
...with gags than with gag rules...
...Mr...
...This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself...
...Kronenberger as having an importance as great as divorce statistics...
...This, however, is simply a specific reflection once again of the distinction between class an sich and class fur sich...
...Status honor" and a "style of life" derive from the former, while the latter is economically determined...
...especially in this connection Bendix's fine discussion of the role of the intellectual in a revolutionary situation and the mass support behind the rise of such a totalitarian movement as Nazism...
...This was not a gimmick...
...Classes, Marx observed, exist before or in the absence of class consciousness...
...What is particularly to our credit," concludes the second page of the last chapter, "we get real pleasure out of making others happy...
...with Dale Carnegie than with Andrew...
...If, on the other hand, status is one thing and class clearly another, then we may still believe that a classless society, i.e., a society in which there can be no individual distinctions in terms of ownership or non-ownership of the socially useful instruments of production, is feasible...
...Comes the Revolution, and Crevecoeur painfully confesses: "No country can exhibit more affecting (instances of great distress) than these afflicted provinces...
...While recognizing the "great value" of the former "as an instrument in the analysis of historical change and social structure," he feels uncomfortable in the presence of squaring this "fact" of class "with the kind of stratification reflected by social attitudes...
...Social scientists are forever fearful of reifying...
...3.00...
...But such definitions or denials are inevitably—though most often implicitly—referred to Marx' basic dictum of the conflict between classes...
...A revealing quotation from the "Poverty of Philosophy" is next introduced, only to be denied two pages later...
...Mr...
...a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen...
...It is unfortunate that they have also, by their attempt to minimize the analytic significance of the distinction between class an sich and class fur sich, paved the way for the continued misunderstanding of the actual role of "unconscious classes" in the march of history...
...E. Digby Baltzell's essay achieves an interesting if not unique solution of the problem of distinguishing between class objective and class subjective by stressing its "abstract" features...
...Speaking of the French peasants of that period, Marx said: "Insofar as millions of [peasant] families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them into hostile contrast to the latter, they form a class...
...And the long, unending task of correction takes up with this statement of a contemporary: "Perhaps the picture (Crevecoeur) gives, though founded on fact, is in some instances embellished with rather too flattering circum stances...
...Thus they have confounded the very existence of a class with something vaguely termed its "success" and predicated its ultimate reality on a "realization of common interests...
...Others, however, might prefer to sharpen the distinction...
...It is simply to assert that any such scheme of social strata will have greater value for understanding problems of social change when related—where possible—to the more significant "dynamic class" relationships...
...Class consciousness of the proletariat is a crucial prerequisite to the kind of action which Marx envisaged as necessary to the transformation of most capitalist societies into socialist...
...This is a line of reasoning congenial to many social class theorists who equate prestige and status with class...
...That from a pen which even twentieth-century professional suspectors of subversion may be expected to credit: George Washington's...
...Next sentence: "The real trouble is — "; but there's no need to complete the sentence...
...That is, Adams, in giving thought to the form of his work, activated the substance...
...Having equated "class" with "stratification" and endowed "social inequality" with the twin sanctions of inevitability and ethical goodness, the authors may now expect us to conclude that a classless society is neither possible nor desirable...
...I HAVE DEALT WITH THIS ESSAY at length for two reasons...
...my emphasis) From this the authors inexplicably conclude that the "formation of a class . . . is a gradual process, which depends for its success upon the development of `common conditions' and upon the subsequent realization of common interests...
...That way schizophrenia lies...
...A Play for Voices, published by New Directions, 1954, $3.00...
...I have tried to suggest that the existence of classes does not depend upon their recognition either by analysts of American social structure or by the members of a class themselves...
...These are large themes...
...For Marx did clearly "identify a social class with position...
...Kronenberger dwells too much in a temperate zone, where life is always a September afternoon, and Arctic winters and tropic Julys never intrude...
...In this article, Davis and Moore start "from the proposition that no society is `classless' or unstratified [:for there is...
...It is a point recently made by Melvin Tumin in an excellent critique of a paper on social stratification written by two of American sociology's leading theoreticians, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore ("Some Principles of Stratification," American Sociological Review, April, 1945...
...There is no reason at all why we should not look upon class phenomena—the subjective as well as the objective kind— as real...
...There's good reason, however, why those who resist the implications of the reality view of classes suggest that they are abstractions...
...and at the same time I want to suggest that an unqualified rave is, unfortunately, not called for...
...But only confusion can result from an attempt to "square" each individual's attitudes with his objective position in the system of production...
...Hence, every society, no matter how simple or complex, must differentiate persons in terms of both prestige and esteem, and must therefore possess a certain amount of institutionalized inequality...
...Yet he is able to get through a 200-page description of this anxiety, and only mention the H-bomb once...
...Since it is neither possible nor desirable to deal with each, or many, of the essays in a review, I want to devote most of my space to an article especially prepared for this volume by Bendix and Lipset...
...This too was no trick, but it invested every page with excitement and momentousness...
...296 • DISSENT • Summer 1954...
...It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have 294 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 nothing...
...Class defined in status terms, or class which is recognized only "when it recognition finds," is not really class and gives us few insights into the dynamics of social life at this moment of world his tory...
...Apart from the plain fact that "social inequality" may not "insure" anything of the kind, there is a subtler logic to the formulations, a more important lesson to be learned...
...Some of the most satisfying pages in the book are those on Oscar Hammerstein: Too often the librettos simply fail to be gay without ever becomingproperly serious...
...Cf...
...it was literature...
...His aim in "Company Manners" is to take up that indispensable task of correction, which a good many writers nowadays find too hot a potato...
...the class of "creative" rich...
...Kronenberger's failure on this score, though literary, is, in the end, more than literary...
...Pointing out that the views of Marx and Engels on social class are nowhere succinctly developed by them, the editors offer their own synthesis in an essay entitled "Karl Marx' Theory of Social Classes...
...We are so surfeited nowadays with national self-congratulation that we forget it once had a ring of the sincere and grateful...
...With Mr...
...And: "Social inequality is . . . an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 293 are conscientiously filled by the most qualified persons...
...Insofar as there is a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union and no political organization, they do not form a class.' But to conclude from this, as do the authors, that "the peasants do not form a social class in Marx' sense," is to confuse the reality of the class with its possible role in historical change at some time in the future...
...The first is that for all of his lack of precision in his discussion and delineation of class, Marx' formulation and treatment of the concept have been the essential point of departure— avowed or otherwise—for vast amounts of materials that have dealt with the phenomenon during the past 100 years...
...Mr...
...They often carry the dread so far that all of the concrete phenomena in the cultural universe become, in their eyes, abstractions and are thus removed from the realm of really fruitful objective analysis...
...It is more concerned with neckties than with psyches...
...Basic Books, N. Y., 1953...
...De Tocqueville really was addressing himself to the political situation in Europe, and felt that America had much to say to it, both as example and as warning...
...in the economic structure of a society...
...This is not to deny the reality of differences in status and prestige, or the value of examining their effects...
...In their essay Bendix and Lipset have brought together and succinctly revealed some of the inadequacies of Marx' formulations, particularly on the predictive level...
...There could be no complaint about Mr...
...Discussing Marx' treatment of the emergence of common beliefs and actions within a class, and how these developments are facilitated by a number of variables arising from the productive process, the authors conclude that: "The organization of production provides the necessary but not a sufficient basis for the existence [sic.] of social classes...
...studies of the problem in America...
...Instead of being an insult to the middlebrow intelligence, he has made the libretto a sop to themiddlebrow emotions...
...And Lipset and Bendix: "It will be apparent from the preceding discussion that Marx did not simply identify a social class with the fact that a large group of people occupied the same objective position in the economic structure of a society...
...If the authors' word "development" be here equated with emergence they are guilty of obvious misinterpretation...
...Only when the members of a 'potential' class enter into an association for the organized pursuit of their common aims, does a class in Marx' sense exist...
...These, then, are the ultimate effects of the insistence that classes must be "conscious of themselves" before they can even be considered classes...
...It is not a question of whether the objective class concept is more, or less, `real' than the subjective class concept...
...This conflict comes into existence as the classes themselves come into being...
...For a cultural critic of our time, Mr...
...Every man is free to define class as he sees it, or even to deny its existence if he chooses...
Vol. 1 • July 1954 • No. 3
