2 The main concerns of Political Sociology: State, Class, Status, Ideology and Power

Varun Patil

Introduction

In this module we will look at some of the founding concerns and concepts of political sociology. Firstlywe will look at how class has been understood by Karl Marx and Max Weber and how contemporary approaches like that of Olin Wright is attempting to combine both these approaches. Secondly we will look at the different ways of looking at Ideology; one inaugurated by Marxism which sees it as a set of illusions that needs to be criticised and the other tradition which sees it as a vehicle for the construction of political hegemony. Thirdly we will look at different perspectives of power: the traditional Weberian ideas of power as getting someone else to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise of power-over, against the recent ones such as Michael Foucault’s which define it as an ability or a capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. Fourthly we will examine the two main approaches to understand the state: one which focuses more on the dynamics of social relations in civil society to explain the state and other which stresses the autonomy of the political. Finally we will look into understanding the importance of social status by examining the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu.

1.1 Class

The study of inequalities in society is one of the most important areas for Sociology. Class is a concept in Sociology which is used to denote one of the major axis of social stratification in society, one based mainly on the position one occupies in the economic structure.

Within Sociology, class became very important with the coming of Marxism. Marx and Engels (1998) claimed that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles’. For Marx, a social class is a group of people who stand in a common relationship to the means of production – the means by which they gain a livelihood. In modern society, the two main classes consist of those who own the means of production (like factories and capital) – industrialists or capitalists, and those who earn their living by selling their labour to them – the working class or the proletariat. According to Marx, the relationship between classes is an exploitative one. In feudal societies exploitation often took the form of the direct transfer of produce from the peasantry to the aristocracy, Serfs were compelled to give a certain proportion of their production to their aristocratic master, or had to work for a number of days each month in his fields to produce crops to be consumed by him and his retinue. In modern capitalist societies, the source of exploitation is less obvious. In the course of the working day, Marx reasoned, workers produce more than is actually needed by employers to repay the cost of hiring them (1967). This surplus value is the source of profit, which capitalists are able to put to their own use.Marxist view on class has come under major criticism from several quarters. Critics see the long-term social trends as moving away from Marx’s theoretical predictions. Marx’s characterization of capitalist society as splitting into ‘two main camps’ – owners and workers has been seen as too simple. Even within the working class, there are divisions between skilled and unskilled workers, which work to prevent a clear convergence of class interests. Such divisions have endured and become more complex, with gender and ethnicity also becoming factors leading to internal competition and conflicts (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Without a developing class consciousness, there can be no concerted class action and, hence, no communist revolution.

Max Weber’s approach to stratification was built on the analysis developed by Marx, but he modified and elaborated on it. Like Marx, Weber regarded society as characterized by conflicts over power and resources. Yet where Marx saw polarized class relations and economic issues at the heart of all social conflict, Weber developed a more complex multidimensional view of society. Social stratification is not simply a matter of class, according to Weber, but is shaped by two further aspects: status and party (1958). These three overlapping elements of stratification produce an enormous number of possible positions within society, rather than the more rigid bipolar model proposed by Marx. According to Weber, class divisions derive not only from control or lack of control of the means of production, but from economic differences that have nothing directly to do with property. Such resources include especially the skills and credentials, or qualifications, which affect the types of work people are able to obtain. Weber argued that an individual’s market position strongly influences his or her overall life chances. Those in managerial or professional occupations earn more and have more favourable conditions of work, for example, than people in blue-collar jobs.

The American sociologist Erik Olin Wright has developed an influential theory of class which combines aspects of both Marx’s and Weber’s approaches (Wright 1978, 1997). According to Wright, there are three dimensions of control over economic resources in modern capitalist production, and these allow us to identify the major classes that exist: control over investments or money capital; control over the physical means of production (land or factories and offices); control over labour power. Those who belong to the capitalist class have control over each of these dimensions in the production system. Members of the working class have control over none of them. In between these two main classes, however, are the groups whose position is more ambiguous – the managers and white-collar workers. These people are in what Wright calls contradictory class locations, because they are able to influence some aspects of production, but are denied control over others. White-collar and professional employees, for example, have to contract their labour power to employers in order to make a living in the same way as manual workers do. But at the same time they have a greater degree of control over the work setting than most people in blue-collar jobs. Wright terms the class position of such workers ‘contradictory’, because they are neither capitalists nor manual workers, yet they share certain common features with each.

IDEOLOGY

The concept of ideology has had different senses in its long historical life. Currently it is survived in two senses: both as a set of illusions that needs to be criticised and as the vehicle for the construction of political hegemony.

The first major contribution to the concept of ideology was by Marx and Engels. They argued that ideas are shaped by the material world, but as historical materialists they understood the material to consist of relations of production that undergo change and development. For Marx and Engels (1974), it is the exploitative and alienating features of capitalist economic relations that prompt ideas they dub ‘ideology.’ Ideology only arises where there are social conditions such as those produced by private property that are vulnerable to criticism and protest; ideology exists to protect these social conditions from attack by those who are disadvantaged by them.

Marx in his study of capitalism, distinguished the sphere of appearances (the market) from the sphere of inner relations (production), and argued that there is a basic inversion at the level of production (1967). Capitalist ideologies give an inverted explanation for market relations, for example, so that human beings perceive their actions as the consequence of economic factors, rather than the other way around, and moreover, thereby understand the market to be natural and inevitable. For instance, the values of freedom and equality present at the level of the market are ideological in that they conceal un-freedom and inequality at the level of production and thus force workers to go back time and again to the labour market. Ideology thus becomes a kind of distorted consciousness that masked the contradictions of society and so contributed to the reproduction of the system.

After Marx, thinking about Ideology branched into different trajectories within Marxism itself. For Gramsci (1971) ideology was more than a (false) conception of the world or a system of ideas; it also had to do, like religion, with a capacity to inspire concrete attitudes and give certain orientations for action. It is in ideology that social classes become aware of their position and historical role, and it is in and by ideology, therefore, that a class can exercise ‘hegemony’ over other classes. By this, Gramsci refers to the ability of a class to secure the adhesion and consent of the masses. Ideology for Gramsci has an integrating effect, based on its ability to win the free consent of the people. In Gramsci, therefore, this hegemonic quality of a worldview, its capacity to become the common sense of the masses, is the key element in all political life.

Louis Althusser (1971) however, re-introduced an opposition between science and ideology and saw the main function of ideology as the ‘interpellation’ of individuals to constitute them as ‘subjects’ who either accept their subordinate role within the system or fight against it. He put forward the concept of the ‘ideological state apparatus’, which operated through religion, education, the trade unions and the mass media. The objective of all ideology is to achieve hegemony, to convert individuals into supporters by providing them with articulated concepts and images that help them make sense of their social existence. Members of the Frankfurt School such as Jurgen Habermas (1981) drew on the Marxist idea of ideology as a distortion of reality to point to its role in communication, wherein interlocutors find that power relations prevent the open, uncoerced articulation of beliefs and values. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, saw capitalism as marked by a growing importance of instrumental rationality and transformed ideology into a purely manipulative force that converges with reality, thus becoming unassailable (1950). Herbert Marcuse (1964) took this logic to the extreme in his view that reason and domination have ceased to be contradictory forces: domination no longer requires repression as it can be achieved through the manipulation of needs.

Outside of Marxism we have had many different approaches to Ideology. One important approach to ideology is Karl Mannheim’s ‘relationism’. Mannheim (1972) held that all points of view have their claims to truth restricted on account of their social determination. At the same time, it is their social determination that gives them a distinctive truth or authenticity. Mannheim elaborated further on the idea of the complex relation between reality and ideology by pointing to the human need for ideology. Ideologies are neither true nor false but are a set of socially conditioned ideas that provide a truth that people, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, want to hear. This leads to the theory of ideology being replaced by a sociology of knowledge.

The recent ‘linguistic turn’ or the post-modern turn in social theory has produced new perspectives on Ideology. Michael Freeden (1996) holds that ideologies are those systems of political thinking through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they inhabit, and then act on that understanding. Ideologies ‘decontest’ or naturalise the meanings of political terms by converting a variety of optional meanings into monolithic certainty. Similarly Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue that ideologies attempt to naturalise society itself by seeking to re-establish closure wherever a social order has been dislocated. They also seek to create and naturalise subject positions for the construction of political identities. Butideologies never succeed in de-contestation or closure. The illusion of closure is the ideological illusion.

POWER

The meaning, nature and distribution of power are central issues for political sociologists. There is a major disagreement in sociology between perspectives which define power as getting someone else to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise of power-over, against those which define it as an ability or a capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something.

Max Weber, gave a general definition of power as ‘the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a command action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’ (Gerth and Mills 1958). To Weber, power is about getting your own way, even against the opposition of others. Most forms of power are not based solely on force, but are legitimated by some form of authority. Max Weber’s discussion of power focused on distinguishing between different categories- or ‘ideal types’ – of authority. For Weber, there were three sources of authority: traditional, charismatic and rational legal. In the modern world, Weber argued, rational-legal authority was increasingly replacing traditional authority. This is power that is legitimated through legally enacted rules and regulations. It is found in modern organizations and bureaucracies and in government, which Weber described as the formal organizations that direct the political life of a society (ibid).

Stephen Lukes (1974) attempted to extend Weber’s (negative) concept of power, more thoroughly, in order to cover all of its possible empirical instances by offering what he calls a ‘three-dimensional view’ of power. He says one-dimensional studies of power focus on the ability to make decisions to go one’s own way in observable conflicts. That is “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”. Two-dimensional analyses look at the ability of social actors and groups to control which issues are decided upon (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). By this, Lukes means that groups or individuals with power can exercise it, not just by making decisions in their own interests, but by limiting the alternatives available to others. Some issues are kept off the agenda. Lukes, building on the previous two types, argues that there is also a three dimensional perspective, which makes for a ‘radical view’ of power. He calls this the ‘manipulation of desires ‘, the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have (1974). He points out that this does not necessarily mean that people are brainwashed. For example, capitalists exercise power over workers by shaping their desires through the media and other means of socialization, to take on the role of worker and mass consumer. Lukes point here is that this ‘ideological’ exercise of power is not explicitly observable or measurable, but can be inferred when people act in ways that are against their own interests. In this model ‘A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’sinterests.’

The second approach has a more positive and productive evaluation of power. It focuses on a capacity or potential to do something or to facilitate things. This approach was initially developed in the diverse arguments of Antonio Gramsci, Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt. It has become mainstream with the rise of post-structuralist theory.

Firstly this approach concerns itself with the strategies and techniques of power, seeing it as diffused throughout a society rather than concentrated in sovereign organisations. Power is seen as a collective property of social systems of cooperating actors that facilitates both collective empowerment and collective discipline. Foucault (1980, 1984) argued that power was not concentrated in one institution, such as the state, or held by anyone group of individuals. He argued that these older models of power, including that of Stephen Lukes, relied on fixed identities. Power was held by groups that were easily identifiable: for example, the ruling class (for Marxists) or men (for feminists). Instead, Foucault argued power operates at all levels of social interaction, in all social institutions, by all people.

Secondly this approach also focused on the self-disciplining nature of how power operates. What Foucault referred to as the ‘discursive formation’ of power operates through mechanisms of socialisation and community building that produce individuals as subjects with particular kinds of mental orientation and routines of action (1984). While the principals in power relations are formed as those who are ‘authorised’ to discipline others, the most effective and pervasive forms of power occur where people have learnt to exercise a self-discipline over their behaviour. They have been discursively formed into subalterns who conform without the need for any direct action on the part of a principal.

Thirdly power is also seen as productive and not just as repressive. Thus radical pluralists like Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 166) see power and conflict not as discrete entities, but as constitutive of social relationships. They criticize the liberal electoral model of politics, arguing that politics does not consist in simply registering already existing interests through elections, but plays a crucial role in shaping political subjects. Thus identities are not discrete and fixed and political agents are “constituted and reconstituted” through their conflictual relations with other members of the polity. In the post-structuralist tradition then power and conflict is not something to be eliminated. The problem of democratic politics, Mouffe argues, is not how to eliminate or tame power, as Habermas hoped, but how to “constitute forms of power [and conflict] that are compatible with democratic values” (1999: 753).

John Scott (2001) argues that only a combination of these two approaches to power can provide a basis for developing a nuanced understanding of the various social forms that power can take. The two elementary forms of social power can be called corrective influence and persuasive influence. Each approach has highlighted different, but complementary, sets of mechanisms, and it is possible to combine them into a more general account of the mechanisms of power, working from the most elementary forms to the more complex patterns of domination found in states, economic structures and other associations.

STATE

The state is one of the most central and elusive of sociological concepts. It is central because states perform so many functions and regulate almost every aspect of people’s lives. This centrality also makes the state elusive, for it is hard to pin down precisely which institutions constitute it and how far it extends. The classic definition of the state was given by Max Weber. For him a state ‘claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (1978). Within sociology traditionally there has been two main approaches to understand the state: one which focuses more on the dynamics of social relations in civil society to explain the state and other which stresses the autonomy of the political.

For Marx (1998) the state was an instrument of the ruling class. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared that ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. Later Marxists took a more complex and nuanced view of the state in capitalist societies. Many social Democratic theorists argued that workers could force through democratic reforms and then use their numerical superiority to elect socialist governments, take control of the state, and through legislation construct a socialist society, without having recourse to revolution. The neo-Marxists like Nicholas Poulantzas (1973) argued that a state required some autonomy from capital if it was to maintain the capitalist system, for it could only act in the long-term interests of capital as a whole if it had some detachment from the immediate concerns of particular capitalist interests.

The traditional Marxist approach to state has come under increasing criticism from many who hold that it does not allow states sufficient autonomy. The mainstream understanding of state in much of political sociology is dominated by Weberian approaches. Theda Skocpol, argues that the state can be considered as an autonomous actor in many situations (1979). She maintains that states do not, anyway, simply act on behalf of classes, for the requirements of maintaining order, and managing national affairs in an international context, give those who control states some autonomy from the demands of domestic interest groups.

In recent times we have had historical and ethnographic studies of state which sees the structuralist and functional analysis of the state be it the Weberian or the various Marxist Political Economy approaches as inadequate in understanding the state.

Firstly these approaches have questioned the strict boundary between state and society. Scholars like Philip Abrahams (1988) and Timothy Mitchell (1991) question the idea of state as a bounded entity separate from society and argue that the boundary is historical, shifting and an act of power relations. Similarly Akhil Gupta (1995) argues for historicizing and provincializing the distinction between state and civil society that is so often assumed to be universal and natural. He says the distinction is a reflection of a particular conjuncture of European history, and that it may not describe or capture postcolonial realities where the boundaries between the state and non-state realms are blurred. Timothy Mitchell argues that we must take such distinctions not as the boundary between two discrete entities but as a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained. He says that once we see that the boundary between the state and civil society is itself an effect of power, then we can begin to conceptualize ‘‘the state’’ within (and not automatically distinct from) other institutional forms through which social relations are lived, such as the family, civil society, and the economy (1991).

Secondly ethnographic studies of state have shown that the state’s power is always disaggregated, that it operates through dispersed networks of power. State is just one power in the wide landscape of power. Das and Poole (2004) observe that the modern state does not always possess the firmness that many assume to be essential to its functioning. An Ethnographic study of the state thus enables us to examine that its rule is coordinated and consolidated through the dispersed institutional and social networks and the roles that ‘‘non-state’’ institutions, communities, and individuals play in mundane processes of governance. This enables us to see that the illusion of cohesion created by states is always contested and fragile, and is the result of hegemonic processes that should not be taken for granted (Gupta and Sharma, 2006: 16).

STATU

Within sociology status relations can be seen in terms of the particular status situations that individuals occupy. The actual social groups that can be formed on the basis of status situations are ‘social estates’, a term sometimes loosely translated as ‘status group’. These social strata are divided by their social honour or social standing and follow a particular style of life. Examples of status based systems include caste system and social estates part of European feudalism.

Max weber was a pioneer in studying status sociologically. Status in Weber’s theory refers to differences between social groups in the social honour or prestige they are accorded by others (1958). Where class referred to social differences based on economic divisions and inequalities, status designated the differentiation of groups in the ‘communal’ sphere in terms of their social honour and social standing. While Marx argued that status distinctions are the result of class divisions in society, Weber argued that status often varies independently of class divisions. Possession of wealth normally tends to confer high status, but there are many exceptions. The term ‘genteel poverty’ refers to one example. In Britain, for example, individuals from aristocratic families continue to enjoy considerable social esteem even when their fortunes have been lost. Conversely, ‘new money’ is often looked on with some scorn by the well-established wealthy. Weber argued that ‘we wish to designate as status situation every typical component of the life chances of people that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor’. Status situations result from the communal relations through which the social honour attributed to a style of life becomes the basis of life chances. Where economic action involves an interest in the preservation or enhancement of utilities, status-oriented actions involve interests in the preservation or enhancement of social honour.

Weber saw class and status as factors that operate alongside each other in all actual societies. Thus, particular forms of social stratification will show elements of each. Nevertheless, he recognised that societies can be distinguished by the relative importance of class and status and that it is possible to identify a broad transition in European societies from traditional ‘status societies’ to the ‘class societies’ of modernity (1958). In modern societies, status is a secondary factor that tends to reflect class divisions, with differences of social honour reinforcing differences of class.

In recent times the sociological importance of status and honour has been revived by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who argued that lifestyle choices are an important indicator of class (1986, 1988). He argues that economic capital which consists of material goods such as property, wealth and income – was important, but that it only provided a partial understanding of class. He identifies four forms of ‘capital’ that characterize class position, of which economic capital is only one: the others are cultural, social and symbolic.

Bourdieu argues that individuals increasingly distinguish themselves from others, not according to economic factors, but on the basis of cultural capital- which includes education, appreciation of the arts, consumption and leisure pursuits. People are aided in the process of accumulating cultural capital by the proliferation of ‘ need merchants’ selling goods and services – either symbolic or actual- for consumption within the capitalist system. Advertisers, marketers, fashion designers, style consultants, interior designers, personal trainers, therapists, web designers and many others are all involved in influencing cultural taste and promoting lifestyle choices among an ever-widening community of consumers. Also important in Bourdieu’s analysis of class is social capital – one’s networks of friends and contacts. Bourdieu defined social capital as the resources that individuals or groups gain ‘by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’. Lastly, Bourdieu argues that symbolic capital- which includes possession of a good reputation – is a final important indication of social class. The idea of symbolic capital is similar to that of social status. Each type of capital in Bourdieu’s account is related and, to an extent, being in possession of one can help in the pursuit of the others (1986).

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