Max Weber and Stratification

German sociologist Max Weber proposed a three-part view of economic and social stratification involving class, status, and party as manifestations of power seeking and display within advanced capitalist societies. Weber's thinking on stratification, first articulated in a handful of pages in his posthumous “Economy and Society” (1922), has formed the basis on much thinking about the relationships between individuals and groups, and between one group and another. This essay discusses German sociologist Max Weber's thinking about stratification, life chances and social action, then proceeds to some applications of his thought to American life in the twenty-first century. It concludes with a discussion contrasting Weber's views on class consciousness with those of Karl Marx.

Keywords Capitalism; Class; Class Consciousness; Economic Stratification; Life Chances; Party; Power; Social Action; Social Stratification; Status

Max Weber & Stratification

Overview

In the space of only twenty pages in his posthumously published Economy and Society (1922), German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) set off what has become nearly a century of discussion about social and economic stratification in society (Barbalet, 1980, p. 401). Weber was concerned with understanding how individuals, acting as rational economic actors, could be roused to find common cause with others out of a sense of enlightened self-interest. Through the social, economic, and political actions and interactions of individuals acting in ad hoc groups, Weber argued, social strata, or layers, would be created and re-created over time. He understood his research project to be an exercise in abstraction, for the subjectivity of the individual human actor was the precise reason why social interactions and stratification could only be observed at a distance and over time (Bryant, 1976, p. 230). Weber never lived to complete his work on social stratification, but it has been carried forward by successive generations of sociologists.

Weber was one of the founding fathers of social science, his mind and work ranging widely over all areas of human activity. Unlike his counterparts in the social sciences, such as the French positivists Comte or Durkheim, Weber did not seek complete, airtight explanations of this human activity, acknowledging that all who seek to understand human behavior see through a glass darkly. Instead, Weber argued that partial, tentative understandings were all that social scientists could reasonably expect to achieve:

Our aim is the understanding of the uniqueness of the reality in which we move. We wish to understand on the one hand the relationships and the cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise. As soon as we attempt to reflect about the way in which life confronts us in immediate concrete situations it presents an infinite multiplicity of successively and existentially emerging and disappearing events, both "within" and "outside" ourselves (as cited in Bryant, 1976, p. 232).

In other words, the most important thing to understand about the world is that it is ever changing, and more to the point, that humans are forever changing. For Weber, we are not merely human beings, but human actors, and it is our actions, taken altogether that make and change the world in which we live. However, because society is at bottom human, with all the unpredictability that humans display, we must accept some degree of uncertainty in our social science and not expect final answers or causes in any Aristotelian sense.

Weber's Concept of Stratification

When contemplating stratification, the mind immediately searches for appropriate similes: Is society set up like a layer cake, with different economic classes piled up from poorest on the bottom, to the richest on top? Are social strata set up as a pyramid, where the poor laborers at the bottom far outnumber the plutocrats at the top? Or is society more like a bank of elevators, where the social and economic fortunes of individuals and groups rise and fall over time?

Weber would not opt for any of these oversimplified images. He was, after all, a social scientist, and to understand Weber, both halves of that title must be held together in creative tension. Perhaps taking his cues from the work of pioneering nineteenth century geologists such as Charles Lyell (1797–1875), who argued that earth history could be read like a book by examining successive rock layers (or strata) of deposited fossils and sediments, Weber argued that there were strata in human society as well. By understanding how these social strata were "deposited," and the cultural "fossils" (such as values and customs) they contained, one could gain greater understanding into larger social trends.

Weber saw social stratification as the product of a complex and interconnected series of jostlings or graspings for power by individuals working through collectives, as made manifest in concepts of class, party and status (Barbalet, 1980, p. 404). Whether they have agreed with him or not about the causes and effects of social stratification, many sociologists over the past century have judged Weber's views on stratification to be nuanced, holistic and a good jumping-off point for further discussion and elaboration.

The Three Class System

Weber proposed a framework of social stratification to explain why human beings became almost invariably divided into socioeconomic strata when living in communities. Weber's three class system, as his understanding of social stratification became known, is based upon three ideal types: class, status and party. These three types, in turn, are for Weber little more than manifestations of power. Indeed, for Weber these three ideal types map to specific types of power:

• Status >Power through the social order

• Class >Power through the economic order

• Party >Power through the political order (Hurst, 2007, p. 202).

Weber himself gave the most lucid definitions of these various manifestations of power:

Now: 'classes,' status groups,' and 'parties' are phenomena of the distribution of power within a community.

In our terminology, 'classes' are not communities; they merely represent possible, and frequent, bases for communal action. We may speak of a 'class' when a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets….

In contrast to classes, status groups are normally communities….we wish to designate as 'status situation' every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor….

… 'parties' live in a house of 'power.' Their action is oriented towards the acquisition of social 'power,' that is to say, toward influencing a communal action no matter what its content may be. In principle, parties may exist in a social 'club' as well as in a 'state.'… They may represent ephemeral or enduring structures. Their means of attaining power may be quite varied, ranging from naked violence of any sort to canvassing for votes with coarse or subtle means: money, social influence, the force of speech, suggestion, clumsy hoax, and so on to the rougher or more artful tactics of obstruction in parliamentary bodies (as cited in Grusky et al., 2006, pp. 44-46).

Power & Wealth

For Weber, power in all its forms is both pursued and expressed. Individuals in status groups seek the approval of others. They practice, as Weber put it, a "specific style of life [that] … is not subservient to economic … purposes." Indeed, Weber notes that self-imposed class rules "may confine normal marriages within the status circle…" (cited in Bendix, 1977, p. 86).

Individuals also seek to attain class rank through economic power and the related accumulation and display of goods such as homes, cars, and other material objects. In contrast to status, Weber further defines a class as

any group of people … [who have the same] typical chance for a supply of goods, external living conditions, and personal life experiences, insofar as this chance is determined by the…power…to dispose of goods or skills for the sake of income in a given economic order…."Class situation" is, in this sense, ultimately "market situation" (cited in Bendix, 1977, pp. 85-86).

Finally, individuals seek power through political engagement, such as membership in a political party. All three manifestations of seeking after power flow into and combine with the others, both within the lives of individuals and within communities as a whole, and in totality they express Weber's theory of stratification.

What is most interesting for Weber is not that human beings chase after such things, or even whether such a quest is worthwhile or noble, but why, in a given time and under certain cultural and historical circumstances, they choose certain means of acquiring power instead of others. In the industrialized world in which Weber and succeeding generations of Western sociologists lived, the common thread in all this seeking after power is that it takes place against the backdrop of a capitalist economic system involving private ownership of property and the means of production (or wealth creation). Power in all its various forms has thus become inextricably linked with economic muscle and the dispersal of wealth, primarily through employer-employee relationships or through political patronage.

Stratification & Social Action

An integral part of Weber's thinking on stratification (one which brings his thinking in this area in line with his work in areas such as religion and politics) is his understanding of social action. Social action involves the application of Weber's somewhat abstract and esoteric discussion of social and economic stratification to the sphere of human activity.

The aim is to improve one's life chances. These are individual and collective activities arising from, and reacting to, social and economic stratification.

Weber delimits four basic types of social action. These are actions oriented by expectations of the behavior of both objects and other individuals in the surrounding milieu (according to Weber, individuals "make use of these expectations as 'conditions' or 'means' for the successful attainment of the actor's own rationally chosen ends"); actions oriented to some absolute value as embodied in some ethical, aesthetic, or perhaps religious code, in other words, action which is morally guided, and not undertaken simply for one's own gain; actions guided by emotive response to or feelings about the surrounding milieu; and actions performed as part of long-standing societal tradition (Hewitt, 1998, par. 4).

It is noteworthy that Weber's grounds for such social action were not economic, but sprung from other, and distinctly private, sources (Bellah, 1997). Personally, Weber preferred liberal democracy and capitalism to socialism, in part because he believed that socialism ran counter to the freedoms of the individual, ensnaring that individual in a mesh of irrational, bureaucratic red tape (Mueller, 1982). His views on the virtues of capitalism are expressed more fully in his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/1905; Eng. trans. 1930).

Applications

Stratification in the United States

Weber's views on social and economic stratification can be applied to society in the United States or any other country, though how well those views have aged remains a matter of discussion and debate. This section will consider some ways that Weber's three class system has been applied to the economic, social and political systems in the United States.

Social Classes

Weber understands social classes as collections of individuals seeking power through economic means. In their quest to secure the best possible life chances, they are bound by what economic goods they can offer in the marketplace. Here Weber joins together social and economic concepts.

Though his thinking on stratification is presented in a handful of pages, it seems clear that there are two senses in which Weber uses the term class. First there is the semipermanent sense of class as a culturally determined group of individuals that endures over generations and is continually refreshed with new members. Second there is the sense of class as something akin to an interest group pursuing a type of social action as described earlier. There is naturally some overlap between these two senses of class.

In the latter sense, classes function in a way similar to associations. Several generations before Weber, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the pervasiveness of public and private associations in America:

In no other country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America. Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals…In the United States associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion (de Tocqueville, 1835/1904, pp. 197, 198).

Today such associations or classes continue in numerous forms and for various ends.

In the former sense of a Weberian class, one can speak of these collectives in socioeconomic terms. Such classes would include the poor, the middle class, and the rich. However, there are substantial shadings and nuances in American social classes today, and social classes today seem to be in a state of flux:

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. In the twenty-first century anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a CEO, and there are more and more self-made billionaires. Only thirty-seven members of 2004's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost two hundred in the mid-1980s (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005, p. 1). In 2013’s Forbes 400, 273 out of 400 members were self-made billionaires (Carlyle, 2013).

Weber, an ardent supporter of capitalism, would no doubt approve of this arguably more rational meritocracy replacing a socioeconomic system based upon inherited wealth.

On the other hand, there is evidence that the income gap between the poorest and the wealthiest Americans is growing larger, with the number of middle income Americans becoming smaller. This, of course, has implications for the life chances of those who are adversely impacted. A May 2008 report from the Congressional Budget Office seems to confirm that income disparities may be widening. "According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed—by 228 percent" ("Rich-Poor Income Gap," 2008). This supports a 2007 analysis of 2005 tax returns which showed that "total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, [but] average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent" (Johnston, 2007, par. 3). A group of international economists who studied IRS data found that between 2009 and 2012, the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased by 31.4 percent, while the income of the remaining 99 percent of Americans only increased by 0.4 percent. Furthermore, the wealthiest 1 percent gained 19.3 percent of all household income and the top 10 percent gained 48.2 percent of total earnings, representing the largest income gap between the extremely wealthy and all other Americans since right before the Great Depression (Neuman, 2013).

Status Groups

Status, in America and historically, is tied to perceptions. For Weber, status is power sought through the social order, and his leading example was that of bureaucracy. He likened a status group to a social class and contrasted it with the commercial class.

Within an American, Western context, one immediately thinks of a celebrity culture in which one's social standing is directly proportional to the number of paparazzi dedicated to tracking one's every movement. Numerous attributes of this celebrity subculture have spilled over into mainstream American culture, as a glance at the supermarket magazine rack will make clear. One could make an argument that status groups, as consumers of goods and services, comprise large swaths of the American population. American consumerism is known around the world, and in recent decades it has been exported—in most cases quite successfully—to other parts of the world.

Parties

Parties seek to gain power through the political order. As Weber noted,

Their means of attaining power may be quite varied, ranging from naked violence of any sort to canvassing for votes with coarse or subtle means: money, social influence, the force of speech, suggestion, clumsy hoax, and so on to the rougher or more artful tactics of obstruction in parliamentary bodies (cited in Grusky et al., 2006, p. 46).

Thus, American parties in a Weberian sense include, but are not limited to, national political parties such as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Parties could also include special interest groups, lobbyists, public speakers, and television executives, among others.

Viewpoints

Weber, Marx, & Class Relations

Sociologists, whether of a Marxist persuasion or not, have given considerable attention to Karl Marx's understanding of class struggle. Weber defines a class as a quintessentially economic grouping in which members can expect relatively similar life chances. Marx defined the proletariat as the working class, which he argued was being economically exploited by the bourgeoisie, variously understood as the business class or the upper middle class, which owned the means of production (Marx & Engels, 1848/1906).

In bringing Marx and Weber together, a question arises: What conditions lead to Marx's proletariat seeking to improve their Weberian life chances? According to Marx, as well as several contemporary scholars of social identity, it is a matter of the proletariat recognizing that they have options:

The fact of being conditioned and the results of the class situation must be distinctly recognizable. For only then the contrast of life chances can be felt not as an absolutely given fact to be accepted, but as a resultant from either the given distribution of property, or the structure of the concrete economic order. It is only then that people may react against the class structure not only through acts of intermittent and irrational protest, but in the form of rational association….The most important historical example of the second category is the class situation of the modern "proletariat" (Zack et al., 1998, p. 119).

Put another way, it is only when a Weberian class—in this case Marx's proletariat—

• Sees their life chances as being dictated to them by the exploitation of their labor by another class (the bourgeoisie), and understands

• That they don't have to accept this imposition upon them, that

• They take action.

This is another way of referring to what Marx and his followers term class consciousness. For Marx, such class action would result, at some undetermined date, in the topping of the bourgeoisie, the common ownership of the means of production and the benevolent global dictatorship of the proletariat. In an 1852 letter Marx summarized his theory of class struggle:

I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society (Marx, 1852; italics in original).

While Marx and Weber agreed that classes existed, and that they should be defined in qualitative rather than quantitative ways (Wright, 2002, p. 839), Weber saw the relationships between those classes in purely individualistic, transactional terms—what each individual, as a rational economic actor, brought to the bargaining table, both in terms of treasure and talents.

Further, Weber disagreed with Marx that the economic relationship between the proletariat (the working class) and the bourgeoisie (the ownership class) is always and everywhere a tinderbox awaiting a spark. He also argued that it was most rational for the bourgeoisie to control the means of production (Wright, 2002, p. 842). In the end, Marx and Weber were united in their disdain for notions of a "mixed economy," such as that later advocated by Keynes and other economists in the twentieth century (Mueller, 1982, p. 155). This is not to say that Weber was an opponent of social welfare programs, for he felt "it was unlikely that any modern market economy would survive for any length of time if it did not provide a certain degree of social welfare, and above all, allow the working classes to thrash out freely their differences with their employers as well as to have a share in the running of political affairs" (Mommsen, 1992, p. 118).

In the United States, trade unions have helped to give a voice to the working class in their dealings with business owners, thus providing a way for workers to have a redress of grievances without having to resort to violence on a large scale. There has to date been no serious attempt by the working class in the United States to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat and a classless socioeconomic system. One could say that Weberian social action, in its mild-to-moderate sense, has mainly prevented large-scale social upheaval through violence, perhaps with the notable exception of the Civil War.

Terms & Concepts

Capitalism: An economic system in which the means of production are privately owned.

Class: For Weber, ad hoc groupings of individuals who come together for the purpose of common economic action. It is a way of seeking power through the economic order.

Class Consciousness: A term used by Marx and others to describe the collective attitude of a class, such as the proletariat. Marx saw class consciousness as a necessary precondition for the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to a classless society.

Economic Stratification: A way of explaining a capitalist economy in which there are those with different levels of wealth.

Life Chances: A term coined by Max Weber to describe the opportunities an individual has to improve the quality of his or her life.

Party: For Weber, a way of seeking power through the political order. According to Weber, a party's aim is to "[influence] a communal action no matter what its content may be."

Power: For Weber, power in all its forms is both pursued and expressed through class, party and status. All three manifestations of seeking after power flow into and combine with the others, both within the lives of individuals and within communities as a whole, and in totality they express Weber's theory of stratification.

Social Action: Individual and collective activities arising from, and reacting to, social and economic stratification.

Social Stratification: For Weber, the product of a complex and interconnected series of jostlings or grasping for power by individuals working through groups, and made manifest in concepts of class, party, and status.

Status: One of three ways in which Weber believed that individuals, acting in communities within a capitalist economic system, sought power. Status, or honor, was believed to accrue to those in possession of economic goods deemed desirable by society as a whole.

Bibliography

Barbalet, J. (1980). Principles of stratification in Max Weber: An interpretation and critique. British Journal of Sociology, 31 , 401-418. Retrieved May 31, 2008, from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5298400&site=ehost-live.

Bellah, R. (1997, Oct. 30). Max Weber and world-denying love: a look at the historical sociology of religion. Paper delivered for the Humanities Center and Burke Lectureship on Religion and Society, University of California, San Diego. Retrieved May 30, 2008 from RobertBellah.com: http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_2.htm.

Bendix, R. (1977). Max Weber: An intellectual portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bowles, D. (2013). Toward an Integrated Theory of Social Stratification. American Journal Of Economics & Sociology, 72, 32-58. Retrieved October 27, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=84482932

Bryant, C. G. A. (1976). Sociology in action: A critique of selected conceptions of the social role of the sociologist. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Carlyle, Erin (2013). How self-made Forbes 400 billionaires earned their money. Forbes.com, 29. Retrieved October 27, 2013, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-made-forbes-400-billionaires-earned-their-money/

De Tocqueville, A. (1835/1904). Democracy in America. Vol. 1. Trans. Henry Reeve. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

Grusky, D.B. & S. Szelenyi, eds. (2006). The inequality reader: Essential readings in class, race, and gender. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Hewitt, W. E. (1998). Social action. In William H. Swatos, Jr. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Hartford Seminary. Retrieved May 30, 2008 from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/SocialA.htm

Hurst, C.E. (2007). Social inequality: Forms, causes, and consequences, 6th Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Johnston, D.C. (2007, March 29). Income gap is widening, data shows [Electronic version]. The New York Times. Retrieved May 26, 2008 from nytimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848/1906). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. Samuel Moore. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co.

Marx, K. (1852, March 5). Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer. Retrieved May 30, 2008 from the Marx/Engels Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm.

Mommsen, W. J. J. (1992). The political and social theory of Max Weber: Collected essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mueller, G. (1982). Socialism and capitalism in the work of Max Weber. British Journal of Sociology, 33 , 151-171. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5297148&site=ehost-live.

Neuman, Scott (2013). Study says America’s income gap widest since Great Depression. Retrieved October 27, 2013, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/10/221124533/study-says-americas-income-gap-widest-since-great-depression

Rich-poor income gap turning into chasm. (2008, May 3). CBS News: U.S. & World. Retrieved May 26, 2008 from wcco.com: http://wcco.com/national/americans.income.gap.2.715388.html.

Scott, J., & Leonhardt, D. (2005, May 15). Class in America: Shadowy lines that still divide. (Cover story). New York Times, 154 (53215), 1-18.

Wright, E. (2002). The shadow of exploitation in Weber's class analysis. American Sociological Review, 67 , 832-853. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from EBSCO online database, Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9020242&site=ehost-live.

Zuck, N., Shrage, L. & Sartwell, C. (1998). Race, class, gender and sexuality: The big questions. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Suggested Reading

Anderson, E., & D.S. Massey, eds. (2001). Problem of the century: Racial stratification in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications.

Cox, O. C. (1950). Max Weber on social stratification: A critique. American Sociological Review, 15 , p. 223-227.

Gerth, H. & C. Wright Mills, eds. (1958). Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York, Oxford University Press.

Hess, A. (2001). Concepts of social stratification: European and American models. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hytrek, G., & Zentgraf, K.M. (2007). America transformed: Globalization, inequality, and power. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levine, R. F. (2006). Social class and stratification: Classic statements and theoretical debates. 2nd Ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Massey, D.S. (2007). Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications.

Mason, K. (2013). Social Stratification and the Body: Gender, Race, and Class. Sociology Compass, 7, 686-698. Retrieved October 27, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=89598987

Morris, L. (2002). Managing migration: Civic stratification and migrants rights. New York: Routledge.

Pattison, E. (2011). Education and Stratification: The Role of Class and Status in Structuring Educational Opportunities. Conference Papers—American Sociological Association, 2121. Retrieved October 27, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=85659649