Class is one of the most fundamental and contested concepts in historical analysis. In the Marxist tradition, class is defined by relationship to the means of production: the bourgeoisie owns the factories, land, and capital; the proletariat sells its labour. This relationship is structural and objective — it exists regardless of whether the people in it are conscious of it. In non-Marxist social science, class is often defined in terms of income, education, and social status — a more descriptive and less theoretically loaded approach.
E.P. Thompson’s contribution
E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) transformed the concept’s use in historical writing. Thompson argued against the structuralist Marxist view that class was simply an objective economic category that existed independently of the people in it. For Thompson, class was something that happened when people with shared economic interests came to recognise and act on those interests — a process, not a structure. ‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’
This distinction — between class as structure and class as experience — has been enormously influential. It opened historical analysis to questions about consciousness, culture, and agency that purely structural accounts ignored.
How to use it in an answer
When class appears in historical arguments, be precise about which conception is being used. An argument that the Nazi electoral breakthrough was driven by the middle class’s fear of proletarianisation is using class in a structural-descriptive sense. An argument that the British labour movement was shaped by a specifically working-class consciousness developed through shared experience is using Thompson’s experiential sense. The distinction matters for assessing the argument’s strength.
Further reading: E.P. Thompson · History from Below · Ideology
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