From Grand Paradigm Battles to Pragmatist Realism: towards an Integrated Class Analysis*

When I began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I saw Marxism as a comprehensive paradigm confronting positivist social science. 1 I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and distinctive methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to the prevalent practices of mainstream social science. While I argued that this battle should be engaged on an empirical as well as a theoretical terrain, I viewed Marxism and mainstream sociology as foundationally distinct and incommensurable. Looking back in the mid-1980s at this earlier work, I wrote: " I originally had visions of glorious paradigm battles, with lances drawn and the valiant Marxist knight unseating the bourgeois rival in a dramatic quantitative joust. What is more, the fantasy saw the vanquished admitting defeat and changing horses as a result. " More than three decades have passed since this early work on class. In the intervening period I have rethought the underlying logic of my approach to class analysis a number of times. 2 While I continue to work within the Marxist tradition, I no longer feel that the most useful way of thinking about Marxism is as a comprehensive paradigm that is incommensurate with " bourgeois " sociology. 3 Rather, I see different theoretical traditions as identifying different kinds of causal processes or mechanisms which they claim have explanatory power for particular agendas. These different traditions have scientific value to the extent that these claims are justified. The different mechanisms elaborated by different theoretical traditions intersect and interact in the world, generating the things which we observe. The Marxist tradition is a valuable and interesting body of ideas because it successfully identifies real mechanisms that matter for a wide range of important problems, but it does not constitute a full-blown " paradigm " capable of comprehensively explaining all things social or subsuming all social mechanisms under a unified framework. It also does not have a monopoly on the capacity to identify real mechanisms, and thus in practice sociological research by Marxists should combine the distinctive Marxist-identified mechanisms with whatever other causal processes seem pertinent to the explanatory task at hand. 4 What might be called " pragmatist realism " has replaced the Grand Battle of Paradigms. In this paper I will explore some of the implications of this pragmatist realism for class analysis. In my theoretical work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I argued for the 1 An early statement …