“The Distribution of Power within the
Political Community: Class, Status, Party”
Max Weber (1925)
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From the early-capitalist Protestant Ethic
to late-capitalist Austerity
Austerity – web definitions
 the trait of great self-denial (especially refraining from worldly pleasures)
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
 severe simplicity
 saving; frugality
 (austere) ascetic: practicing great self-denial; "Be systematically
ascetic...do...something for no other reason than that you would rather
not do it"-William James; "a desert nomad's austere life
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
 In economics, austerity is when a government reduces its spending
and/or increases user fees and taxes to pay back creditors. Austerity is
usually required when a government's fiscal deficit spending is believed to
be unsustainable. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity
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Disenchantment of the world
 While rationalization “may breed greater efficiency in obtaining
designated ends, it also leads to disenchantment, where “there are no
mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that
one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” (159)
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Weber’s four types of social action
Nonrational
Affective action
Traditional action
ORDER
Value-rational action
Collective
Individual
Instrumental-rational action
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A
C
T
I
O
N
Rational
Verstehen: interpretive understanding
 Weber defined sociology as a “science which attempts the
interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to
arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effect”
 Unlike Marx and Durkheim, who sought to uncover universal laws
applicable to all societies, Weber attends to the production of
meaningful behavior as it is grounded within a specific historical
context
 seeks to understand the culturally-patterned states of mind or motivations
that guide individuals’ behavior
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Ideal type
 The ideal type is analytical construct, a means to do social research
 A tool that aids description and explanation
 Ideal type is derived from empirical observation, but it’s an
abstraction
 The combination of elements which although found in reality, are
rarely found in this specific form
 It's not "ideal" in the normative sense, but in the sense that this
combination of elements is not found in reality in this pure form
 e.g., an ideal type of "criminal,” “monopoly,” or “plutocracy”
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Ideal types of social action
traditional: actions controlled by tradition or deeply rooted habits,
"the way it's always been done"
2) affective: actions determined by the actor's specific affections and
emotional state
3) value-rational: actions that are determined by a conscious belief in
the inherent – ethical, esthetic, religious, etc. – value of a type of
behavior, regardless of its effects
4) instrumental-rational: actions that are carried out to achieve a certain
goal; the actor calculates which actions will lead in the best and
most effective manner to the goal that's been set
1)
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Class as self-identification
 The practice of people locating themselves within a class structure
– rather than being “assigned” to classes based on particular
relations or attributes, such as wealth or occupation – is often
called “subjective class identification”
 Survey methods typically rely on this conceptualization of class
 The General Social Survey (GSS), a representative, unrestricted
sample of all Americans over age 18 measures the subjective class
identification of Americans
 Q: “If you were asked to use one of four names for your social class, would you
say you belong in: the lower class, the working class, the middle class, or the
upper class?”
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42% of Americans say they’re middle class, while almost 47%
identify as working class. By contrast, a relatively small slice (8%)
of Americans call themselves lower class, and very few (less than
3%) identify as upper class.
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Class, status and party
 Classes, status groups, and parties are phenomena of the
distribution of power within a community
 power: the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own
will in a social action even against the resistance of others
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A. Economically determined power and the
status order
 The structure of every legal order directly influences the distribution
of power, economic or otherwise, within its respective community
 Economically conditioned power is not identical with power as such
 Economic power may be the result of power on other grounds
 People do not strive for power only to enrich economically
 Power may be valued for its own sake
 Striving for power often is conditioned by social honor, but not all power
entails social honor, e.g., the “typical American Boss,” the “typical big speculator”
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B. Determination of class situation by
market situation
 Class is economically determined but it refers not simply to relations to
the means of production (owners of capital vs owners of labor power a la Marx)
 Class refers more broadly to market situation
 Weber subdivides property owners based on the kind of property that is
usable for returns:
 rentiers and entrepreneurs
 Weber subdivides those who lack property on the basis of the kinds of
services offered and they way in which they make use of these services:
 unskilled workers, skilled laborers, professionals, etc.
 Class refers to "similarity of life chances" as determined by "economic
interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income" under
the conditions of the commodity or labor markets
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C. Social action flowing from class interest
 The emergence of an association or even of mere social action from a
common class situation is by no means a universal phenomenon
 Often merely amorphous social action emerges (e.g., “grumbling”)
 For “class action,” the contrast of life chances must be distinctly
recognizable and seen as resulting from either
1) the given distribution of property (seen in urban centers of Antiquity
and the Middle Ages) or
2) the structure of the concrete economic order (seen in the class
situation of the modern proletariat)
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D. Types of class struggle
 A class does not in itself constitute a group
 Social action that brings forth class situations is not basically action
among members of the identical class; it is an action among
members of different classes
 Weber described the changing nature of class struggle through the
late 19th century as shifting from the issue of credit, to struggles in
the commodity market (exchange) to wage disputes on the labor
market (production), and claimed “Today the central issue is the
determination of the price of labor.”
 That may have been the case in Weber’s day, but circa 2012 the situation
is markedly different
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Market situation: the rise of creditors
 Rentier: an archaic word for asset owners or creditors, i.e., individuals
who gain income from assets (interest, rent, dividends, or capital
gains) rather than labor
 “The creditor-debtor relation becomes the basis of ‘class situations’
first in the cities” where credit markets are located and concentrated
in the hands of a “plutocracy.” “Therewith, ‘class struggles’ begin.”
(194)
 Many claim such a situation exists today:
“Creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in
which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on
everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game."
(Paul Krugman, NYT, 6/10/2011)
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The latest Quarterly Release on Household Debt and Credit from the Federal
Reserve shows 2 notable trends: 1) the amount of consumer debt is declining,
but delinquency rates are stabilizing above what they were pre-crisis; 2) the
number of people subject to 3rd party collections has doubled since 2000. Ten
years ago, 1 in 14 Americans were pursued by debt collectors. Today it’s 1 in 7.
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E. Status honor
 Status situation is determined by social estimation of honor, which may
be connected with any quality shared by a plurality and, of course, it
can be connected to a class situation
 In contrast to classes status groups are usually “groups” but are often
amorphous
 Class distinctions are linked in varied ways with status distinctions
 Status is stratification according to principles of consumption of goods
and services, i.e., "lifestyle"
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F. Ethnic segregation and caste
 Status groups can evolve into closed castes
 Status distinctions are then guaranteed not merely by conventions and
laws, but also by religious sanctions
 this generally happens only when underlying differences are said to be
"ethnic"
 Ethnic segregation grown into a caste transforms the horizontal and
unconnected coexistences of ethnically segregated groups into a
vertical social system of domination and subordination
 Ethnic communities are based on a belief of commonality rather than
any objective “racial differences”
 The relationship between ethnicity/race and social status is variable
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G. Status privileges
 Stratification by status goes hand in hand with a monopolization of
ideal and material goods or opportunities
 Material monopolies provide the most effective motives for the
exclusiveness of a status
 Physical labor generally disqualifies one from membership in the
most privileged status groups
 Weber: “This disqualification is now setting in in America against the
old tradition of esteem for labor.”
 Often economic pursuits, especially entrepreneurial activity, is seen
as a debasement of status
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H. Economic conditions and effects of
stratification
 "With some oversimplification, one might say that classes are
stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition
of goods; whereas status groups are stratified according to the
principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special
styles of life." (200)
 The general effect of the status order is "the hindrance of the free
development of the market"
 "Therefore, everywhere some status groups and usually the most
influential, consider almost any kind of overt participation in economic
acquisition as absolutely stigmatizing" e.g., the parvenu or nouveau riche
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I. Parties
 Whereas classes are within economic order, status groups within the
social order, "parties reside in the sphere of power"
 Compared with class and status groups, party-oriented social action
always involves association directed toward a goal, which is striven
for in a planned manner
 The goal may be a cause or may be personal
 Parties are only possible in groups with an associated character, i.e.,
some form of rational order and a staff of persons available to
enforce it
 Parties need not be based on purely class nor status
 Parties differ according to whether or not the community is
stratified by status or by class, above all, according to the structure
of authority
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