Draft Essay – Not to Be Refered

The discourse of class is a child of the Enlightenment. It was from the mid eighteenth century that ‘class’ as a term descriptive of social distinctions slid into the languages of western Europe. Initially its intellectual appeal owed much to its apparent analytical neutrality. It facilitated the Enlightenment project of exploring the nature and historical development of human society. Yet its rapid adoption as the conventional vocabulary of social classification perhaps owed more to the implications of that analysis. First, it focused attention upon the economic structures of society, tracing social subordination to the unequal distribution of property and anatomizing society in terms of broad economic interest groups. Secondly, it conveyed a sense of the mutability of the social order, of the contingency of its present forms. Third, it was potentially (and sometimes actually) critical of conceptions of society which disguised privilege and exploitation in the mantle of divine sanction and organic harmony. It carried charges of political electricity. It could be used not only to describe and to explain, but also to challenge; to stake claims.