Class, Status and Power: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu

Follows: The Pecking Order (Society 1), The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented (Politics), and Clase Social y Dinero (Español)

In this deep dive
1. Marx: class as your relation to the means of production
2. Weber: class, status and party are three different things
3. Bourdieu: the capital you can't put in a bank
4. The functionalist answer: is inequality useful? (Davis and Moore, and Tumin)
5. Elites: Mills, Michels and Pareto
6. Using the lenses together

Picture three people at a wedding. One owns a chain of car washes and has more money than anyone in the room, but he mispronounces the wine and nobody quite knows where to seat him. One is a university professor on a modest salary who chats easily with the bride's parents about books they've all read. The third is a city councillor: middling income, no special polish, but the person everyone wants a word with, because she sits on the committee that decides planning permits.

Who ranks highest?

If your answer is "it depends what you mean," you've already reached the conclusion that took sociology about a century to work out. The first piece in this series looked at hierarchy in general: why humans seek status, and how foragers, farmers and states differed. This one looks at the thinkers who tried to say what modern rank is actually made of. The Spanish piece Clase Social y Dinero introduced Bourdieu's forms of capital in a few paragraphs. Here they get their full argument, alongside Marx, Weber, the functionalists and the elite theorists, each in their own terms, each with their strongest case and their main critics.

A word on approach. Several of these thinkers became banners for political movements. This piece isn't choosing a side. Each theory is presented as its defenders would recognise it, and each critique as its makers meant it.

Part 1 — Marx: class as your relation to the means of production

Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not invent the idea of class, but he gave it its most famous definition. For Marx, your class isn't your income, your accent or your job title. It's your relationship to the means of production: the land, machines, factories and tools that a society needs to produce what it lives on.

Under capitalism, he argued, that relationship splits people into two great groups:

• The bourgeoisie own the means of production. They live on profit.
• The proletariat own nothing but their ability to work. They live by selling that ability for wages.

The Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels and published in 1848, opens with the line that made the idea famous. In Samuel Moore's 1888 translation, which Engels revised:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf: every era, the Manifesto says, has had its oppressors and oppressed, and modern society is "splitting up into two great hostile camps." It even predicted that the in-between groups (small shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants) would "sink gradually into the proletariat," squeezed out by big industry.

Why does this relationship matter so much? Because, Marx argued, the owner's profit comes from the gap between what workers produce and what they are paid. This is the theory of exploitation, and it makes class a relationship of conflict built into the system, not a matter of bad bosses or good ones. It also shapes how people think. In the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

Two refinements show that Marx was subtler than his slogans:

• A class "in itself" and "for itself." In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), he wrote of workers who share a common situation as "already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself." A class only becomes a political force when its members recognise their shared interest and organise.
• The sack of potatoes. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), he described French small farmers as living side by side without real ties, forming a class "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes": similar, but unable to act together.

And Marx knew the real world was messier than two camps. In the third volume of Capital, published after his death, the chapter titled "Classes" admits that even in England "middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere." He then asks, "What constitutes a class?" and begins to answer. A few paragraphs later the manuscript simply stops. The editor's note reads: "[Here the manuscript breaks off.]"

The strongest case for Marx's view. It explains things other approaches only describe. Why do wages and profits move in opposite directions in some periods? Why do owners and workers so often clash over the same decisions? Why do people's politics track their economic position? Marx's answer is that class is not a ranking but a relationship, and that relationships of ownership shape power, ideas and history. Even many non-Marxist sociologists accept that who owns productive assets, and who must work for others, is a basic fact about any society.

The main critiques.

Marxist sociologists answered some of these. Erik Olin Wright, for instance, developed the idea of contradictory class locations for people like managers who sit between owners and workers. But by the mid-twentieth century most researchers wanted a richer toolkit, and they found one in a German contemporary who had read Marx closely.

Part 2 — Weber: class, status and party are three different things

Max Weber (1864–1920) agreed with Marx that economic position matters enormously. He disagreed that it was the only thing that matters, or that everything else follows from it. In an essay written before the First World War and published after his death in his great work Economy and Society (1922), Weber split social rank into three dimensions. In English it's usually called "Class, Status, Party."

1. Class is about your position in the market. What can you sell (property, skills, labour) and on what terms? Your market situation shapes your life chances: your odds of a decent house, good health, education for your children. This is close to Marx, but broader. A surgeon and a cleaner both sell their work, yet their market situations, and their life chances, are worlds apart.

2. Status (Weber's German word is Stand) is about social honour: how much respect a group's way of life commands. Status groups show themselves in who marries whom, who eats with whom, the conventions they keep, and the opportunities they try to keep for themselves. Weber's key point was that status and wealth can come apart. Mere money, he argued, isn't automatically a recognised basis of honour; the newly rich speculator can be wealthy and still looked down on, while an impoverished aristocrat or a respected cleric keeps standing without much cash.

3. Party is about organised power: groups that set out to win control of an organisation or a state, in order to get things done for their members. A party in Weber's sense can be a political party, but also a lobby, a movement or a faction.

Marx asked who owns what. Weber added two more questions: who is respected, and who is organised to get their way?

The strongest case for Weber's view. It fits a world where people's positions don't line up neatly. Clergy, teachers and nurses often hold more respect than income. Some of the wealthiest people are not the most powerful, and some of the most powerful are not wealthy. Weber also explains why groups fight over respect as fiercely as over money, and why status groups, from medieval guilds to modern professions, work so hard to control who gets in. His categories are the ancestors of most modern ways of measuring class.

Weber's own examples make the point vividly. He observed that the typical American boss, like the big speculator, deliberately gave up claims to social honour: they were rich and powerful, but not respectable in the old sense. The reverse was also common, in groups whose members guarded their standing by controlling marriage, dining and entry into their circle, from old aristocracies to closed professions.

Weber's influence is still visible in how class is measured. The most widely validated British measure, the Nuffield class schema developed in the 1970s and codified in the UK's official National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification, sorts people mainly by the kind of employment relationship they have: routine workers on a "labour contract" on one side, professionals and managers on a "service contract," with career prospects and trust, on the other. That is a question about market situation and life chances, not about ownership.

The main critiques. Marxists answer that Weber describes appearances, but that status and party usually follow economic power in the long run: honour gets bought, and parties get funded. Others say that splitting rank into many dimensions makes it harder to explain anything, because you can always find a dimension that fits. And Weber, like Marx, built his categories from European history; how well they travel to societies organised around caste, kinship or religion is a question the next piece in this series takes up.

Part 3 — Bourdieu: the capital you can't put in a bank

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) knew about class from the inside. He grew up in Béarn, a rural corner of southwest France, the son of a postal worker, in a household that spoke Béarnese, the local form of Gascon. He rose through France's most elite schools and later held a chair at the Collège de France. He served in Algeria during its war of independence and stayed on to do fieldwork among the Kabyle people. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to explain the invisible rules he had to learn on the way up.

His most famous book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English 1984), drew on surveys carried out between 1963 and 1968. In 1998 the International Sociological Association voted it the sixth most important sociology book of the twentieth century.

Forms of capital. Bourdieu's first move was to extend the idea of "capital" beyond money. As the Spanish piece explained, he distinguished:

• Economic capital: money, property, assets.
• Cultural capital: education, knowledge, ways of speaking, familiarity with "legitimate" culture, credentials.
• Social capital: networks of relationships, connections you can call on.
• Symbolic capital: prestige and recognition, which the other forms can turn into once others accept them as legitimate.

Capital in his sense is anything that gives you advantage in a particular arena (Bourdieu called these arenas fields), and the forms can be converted into each other, at a cost. Money buys elite schooling, which becomes cultural capital; credentials open doors to networks; networks lead to money.

Habitus. His second move was the concept that makes Bourdieu distinctive. Habitus is the set of "durable, transposable dispositions" that you absorb from your upbringing: how you stand, speak, eat, dress and feel at ease. It's class lodged in the body, a feel for the game you acquired without trying. Someone with the habitus of an elite family walks into an interview, a gallery or a dinner party and simply knows the rules. Someone without it can learn them, but often feels the effort, and others can sense it.

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." — Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

Taste as a weapon. In Distinction, Bourdieu argued that what we call good taste is not neutral. Preferences in music, food, art and decoration line up with class, and the tastes of the dominant classes are treated as simply better, as natural refinement rather than learned habit. When working-class people accept that their own tastes are inferior, Bourdieu called it symbolic violence: domination that works because the dominated share the dominant group's view of what counts.

The strongest case for Bourdieu's view. It explains what money alone can't: why children of educated parents tend to do well at school even when family income is similar, why first-generation professionals often feel like impostors, and why class persists in societies that have removed formal barriers. Empirical work has repeatedly found links between cultural capital and success. A 1982 study by Paul DiMaggio, for instance, found that American high school students' participation in "status culture" was related to their grades. Bourdieu also influenced how modern class surveys are built. In 2013 Mike Savage and colleagues, analysing the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey (161,400 online respondents plus a nationally representative sample), used economic, cultural and social capital together to propose seven British classes, from an "elite" to a "precariat."

The main critiques.

Bourdieu's defenders reply that "omnivorous" taste can itself be a new form of distinction, since knowing how to enjoy everything in the right way is a skill that takes cultural capital. That argument is still running.

Part 4 — The functionalist answer: is inequality useful?

So far, every thinker has treated inequality as something to be explained, and usually criticised. In 1945 two American sociologists, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, asked a different question: what if inequality does a job for society?

Their short paper, "Some Principles of Stratification," became the core statement of the functionalist view, associated with Talcott Parsons and his school, which explains social institutions by the functions they perform. Their argument runs roughly like this:

1. Some positions in any society are more functionally important than others.
2. Some positions require scarce talent or long and costly training.
3. To make sure capable people take on the important, demanding positions and perform them well, society must offer bigger rewards: income, prestige, comfort.
4. So unequal rewards are not a malfunction. They are, in effect, the mechanism that sorts people into the roles society most needs.

Notice the direction of causation. On this view, a job is not important because it is well paid; it is well paid because it is important and the people able to do it are scarce.

Davis and Moore did not say inequality was fair. They said that no complex society had managed without it, and they wanted to know why.

The strongest case. It offers an explanation for why complex societies, including those founded on promises of equality, have kept unequal rewards. It connects to ordinary intuitions: few people would train for a decade to be a surgeon if the pay and respect were the same as for an unskilled job. And it fits the economic logic of incentives that most economists accept.

Tumin's critique. In 1953 Melvin Tumin, a Princeton sociologist, published "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis," the most famous reply in the debate. His main points:

• Importance can't be measured objectively. Who decides that one role is more "functionally important" than another? A society needs its engineers, but it also needs the people who build what they design.
• Talent is not objectively measured either, and its supply is not fixed. Inequality itself limits the pool, because children from poor families never get the chance to show what they can do.
• The "sacrifice" of training is overstated. He questioned whether people in long training really make the great sacrifices the theory assumes.
• Money is not the only motive. People also work for meaning, duty and the satisfaction of doing a job well.

Davis replied that he was trying to explain inequality, not justify it, and accused Tumin of misreading him. Later critics added a sharper example: if pay tracked functional importance, why would entertainers and star athletes earn many times more than teachers? And many pointed out that inherited wealth and family connections are causes of who gets the top positions, not just results.

Functionalism peaked in the 1940s and 1950s and was in rapid decline in sociology by the 1960s, but the core question never went away. It has even returned through genetics. A 2026 review of the new field of sociogenomics points out that some researchers read genetic influences on education and occupation as a measure of how meritocratic a society has become, an interpretation the authors trace straight back to Davis and Moore's picture of a society sorting people into positions by efficiency and scarce talent. Tumin's objection carries over in modern form: what counts as "talent" depends on what a society chooses to reward, and on who gets the chance to develop it. Every debate about whether high pay for executives or doctors is "deserved," or whether a flatter society would lose its incentives, is a rerun of Davis, Moore and Tumin.

Part 5 — Elites: Mills, Michels and Pareto

Marx, Weber and Bourdieu describe classes, large groups of people. Another tradition asks a more pointed question: who actually rules? Its answer is that, whatever a society's formal rules, a small minority always does.

Pareto: history as a graveyard of aristocracies. The Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who succeeded Léon Walras in the chair of political economy at Lausanne, argued in his Treatise on General Sociology (1916) that every society is run by an elite, by which he meant, without moral praise, the people who score highest in their field. Elites don't last. They grow complacent or close themselves off, and new talent from below either gets absorbed or overthrows them. History, in his phrase, is "a graveyard of aristocracies." Borrowing from Machiavelli, he divided rulers into foxes, who govern by cunning and deal-making, and lions, who govern by force and conviction; a healthy ruling group needs a mix. Pareto's politics are contested. He welcomed Mussolini's rise and was honoured by the new regime shortly before his death in 1923, but how far he actually endorsed fascism is, as historians put it, a matter of controversy.

Michels: the iron law of oligarchy. Robert Michels (1876–1936), a friend and student of Weber, was an active socialist who studied the very kind of party he belonged to. He had joined Germany's Social Democratic Party and stood, unsuccessfully, for parliament for it in 1903. What he found disturbed him. In Political Parties (1911; English 1915), he argued that any large organisation needs professional leaders, specialists, newspapers and offices. Members are busy and grateful to the people who run things. Leaders gain expertise and control of information, and they come to value their positions. The result, in the 1915 translation by Eden and Cedar Paul:

"It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy." — Robert Michels, Political Parties, Part VI, ch. 2

His own life added an ironic footnote. After moving to Italy, Michels drifted from socialism through revolutionary syndicalism to fascism, joining Mussolini's party in 1924.

The "iron law" has been tested many times. The best-known exception is the International Typographical Union, which Seymour Martin Lipset and colleagues found had stayed genuinely democratic (Union Democracy, 1956). More recently, researchers have studied whether online volunteer projects escape the law; a 2014 study by Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill was titled, tellingly, "Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production."

Mills: the power elite. In The Power Elite (1956), the American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that post-war America was run by the interlocking leaders of three institutions: the giant corporations ("two or three hundred" of them), the federal government, and the military. These people tended to come from the same prep schools and elite universities and belong to the same exclusive clubs, and their decisions affected not only Americans but, as he put it, "the underlying populations of the world." Mills was careful to say this was not a conspiracy; members of the elite might not even see themselves as one. Five years later President Dwight Eisenhower, a former general, used his farewell address on 17 January 1961 to warn Americans against the influence of the "military-industrial complex."

The pluralist reply. The political scientist Robert Dahl answered Mills directly. In a 1958 paper, "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model," he pointed out that the theory could be cast "in a form that makes it virtually impossible to disprove": if the visible leaders don't look like a ruling elite, one can always claim a hidden elite behind them. In Who Governs? (1961), a study of New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl argued that many interest groups competed for influence and that power was spread among them, with government acting as a broker. Critics of Dahl replied that he only counted the decisions that were openly fought over. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) argued that power also lies in keeping issues off the agenda, and Steven Lukes later added a third face: shaping what people want in the first place.

The modern evidence. The argument is now fought with data. In 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analysed 1,779 US policy issues and concluded that economic elites and business-oriented groups had "substantial independent impacts" on policy, while average citizens had "little or no independent influence." Peter Enns (2015) replied that even when the rich and the middle class disagree, policy tends to end up about where the middle would want, because the two groups usually rank policies in the same order. Both papers are widely cited, and the dispute remains open.

Part 6 — Using the lenses together

Go back to the wedding. Marx would ask who owns productive property: the car-wash owner, clearly, is the only capitalist in the room. Weber would separate the three dimensions: the businessman leads on class, the professor on status, the councillor on party. Bourdieu would notice that the professor's ease with the bride's parents is itself a form of capital, and that the businessman's discomfort shows a habitus formed somewhere else. Davis and Moore would ask whether the rewards each receives reflect the scarcity and importance of what they do. Michels and Mills would want to know whether the councillor's committee answers to voters or to a few insiders.

Modern sociologists rarely pick just one. Official statistics in the UK, for instance, use a seven-class scheme built from people's occupations and employment conditions; the Great British Class Survey added Bourdieu's capitals; and debates about billionaires and political donations draw on Mills and Michels. The lenses compete, but they also complement each other.

Try them on a figure who didn't exist in any of these thinkers' lifetimes: a driver who works through a ride-hailing app.

• Marx would ask who owns the means of production. The driver owns the car, which looks like a small capitalist's asset; the company owns the platform, the data and the pricing algorithm, which is where the real control lies. Is the driver a worker, a tiny business, or one of Wright's contradictory locations?
• Weber would separate the dimensions. The driver's market situation (often no guaranteed hours or pension) shapes life chances; the job carries little social honour; and drivers have little "party" power unless they organise.
• Bourdieu would look at capital and habitus. A driver with a university degree and fluent local speech is carrying cultural capital that might convert into a different job; one without may find the door narrower.
• Davis and Moore would ask whether the rewards reflect how important and how scarce the work is, and Tumin would ask who decided what counts as important.
• Michels and Mills would ask who writes the platform's rules, and whether drivers, customers or regulators have any real say.

Each lens shows something real. None shows everything.

A useful habit follows. When you hear someone say that "class" explains an election, a school result or a health statistic, ask which class they mean: ownership (Marx), market situation and honour (Weber), inherited capital and habitus (Bourdieu), or a ranking of rewards (Davis and Moore). Many arguments that seem to be about facts turn out to be about definitions, and the disagreement often dissolves, or sharpens usefully, once that is clear.

There's one more reason to know them all. Each has been used as a weapon: Marx to justify revolutions and regimes that created new elites, functionalism to justify every existing inequality, elite theory by people on the far left and the far right alike. Reading them in their own terms, with their critics alongside, is the best defence against being recruited by any one of them without noticing.

The takeaway

Marx defined class by ownership of the means of production and saw history as class struggle. Weber split rank into class (market position), status (honour) and party (organised power), which can diverge. Bourdieu showed how cultural and social capital, carried in the habitus, pass advantage on without formal barriers. Davis and Moore argued that unequal rewards fill society's most important jobs; Tumin answered that importance and talent can't be measured and inequality limits opportunity. Pareto, Michels and Mills argued that minorities always rule, and pluralists like Dahl pushed back. Each lens sees something the others miss.

Try this: pick someone you know well, or yourself, and score them on Weber's three dimensions (class, status, party) and Bourdieu's four capitals (economic, cultural, social, symbolic). Where are they high, and where low? Then ask which lens explains their life best, and which one they'd be most annoyed to be described by.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), ch. 1, Samuel Moore's 1888 translation; Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), ch. 2; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ch. 7; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Capital, vol. III, ch. 52 "Classes" — all from the Marxists Internet Archive. Dates: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Karl Marx."
- Bernstein (1899), Dahrendorf (1959), Djilas (1957) and Wright's contradictory class locations: the corresponding Wikipedia entries, used as leads.
- Weber, "Class, Status, Party," in Economy and Society (1922): summarised in Wikipedia's "Three-component theory of stratification"; dates from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber."
- Bourdieu, Distinction (1979; trans. 1984) and biographical details: Wikipedia, "Pierre Bourdieu" and "Distinction (book)." DiMaggio, P. American Sociological Review 47(2), 1982. Jenkins, R. "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism." Sociology 16(2), 1982. Lamont, M. Money, Morals, and Manners (1992). Peterson, R. & Kern, R. "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore." American Sociological Review 61(5), 1996. Savage, M. et al. "A New Model of Social Class?" Sociology 47(2), 2013. Mills, C. "The Great British Class Fiasco." Sociology 48(3), 2014.
- Davis, K. & Moore, W.E. "Some Principles of Stratification." American Sociological Review 10(2), 1945. Tumin, M. "Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis." American Sociological Review 18(4), 1953; the debate as summarised in Wikipedia's "Melvin Tumin" and "Structural functionalism."
- Pareto: Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" and "Circulation of elites." Michels, R. Political Parties, trans. Eden & Cedar Paul (1915), Internet Archive; biography from Wikipedia. Lipset, Trow & Coleman, Union Democracy (1956). Shaw, A. & Hill, B.M. Journal of Communication 64(2), 2014.
- Mills, C.W. The Power Elite (1956). Dahl, R. "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model." American Political Science Review 52(2), 1958; Who Governs? (1961). Bachrach, P. & Baratz, M. "Two Faces of Power." APSR 56(4), 1962. Gilens, M. & Page, B. "Testing Theories of American Politics." Perspectives on Politics 12(3), 2014. Enns, P. "Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation." Perspectives on Politics 13(4), 2015.

Go deeper
- 🌐 The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, at the Marxists Internet Archive (short, vivid and worth reading in the original, whatever you think of it)
- 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Max Weber (a careful guide to Weber's method and his worries about bureaucracy)
- 📘 Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu (dense but rewarding; start with the introduction and the chapters on taste)
- 📘 Social Class in the 21st Century — Mike Savage and colleagues (Bourdieu's capitals applied to modern Britain, by the Great British Class Survey team)
- 📘 The Power Elite — C. Wright Mills (still readable and still argued about seventy years on)
- 📘 Political Parties — Robert Michels (the iron law, from a disillusioned insider; the 1915 translation is in the public domain)