Classes

'Class' and 'classes' are terms that are used with promiscuity in the social sciences, yet their precise meaning is rarely explored with great rigour or care, and, in fact, the meaning varies according to the theoretical background of the person using the term. Even Marxist social theory, which builds its explanatory framework around the concept of class, has, all too often, failed to systematically disarticulate and interrogate the nature of the term. Erik Olin Wright's research constitutes an ongoing project, which dates back to the 1970s, to address these gaps and weaknesses in the Marxist account, at both the theoretical and the empirical levels. In Classes, Wright presents a complete reformulation of the Marxist concept of social class, one which seeks to bridge the gap between abstract structural accounts and the description of class actors in particular historical situations. Moving beyond the argument developed in his classic Class, Crisis and the State, Wright draws on John Roemer's work on the theory of exploitation to construct an audacious new general framework for thinking about class which he then subjects to statistically-based analysis.