The Breakdown of Class Politics: A Debate on Post-Industrial Stratification. Edited by Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 352 p. $18.95.

Extract

This book is a collection of essays from a 1996 conference that brought together a number of political sociologists to discuss an article from 1991 by the coorganizers, Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, originally published in International Sociology. They argued that the collapse of blue-collar industries and other changes in occupational and income structures associated with postindustrial social stratification had lead to a breakdown of class politics. Two years later, the journal published a rebuttal by Mike Hout, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza that class conflict remained important but that the political parties ignored it. The two articles and a 1993 response by Clark and Lipset are republished here together with a series of response papers written for the 1996 conference. Hout et al. criticized Clark and Lipset for failing to distinguish between class as a social phenomenon and the political representation of class. “Class interests may remain latent in the political arena,” they wrote, “but this does not mean that they do not exist” (p. 64).