Abstract

Although class inequalities persist in contemporary capitalist societies, class as a vocabulary of belonging and political conflict has virtually disappeared. In social science analyses too, class has analysis has only recently made a cautious return, after long being viewed as a dated, or even politically suspicious concept. As we discuss in this contribution, the recent disappearance and reappearance of ‘class talk’ are but one episode of a longer story, in which the fluctuating political salience of class went hand in hand with drastically changing conceptions and operationalizations of class in the social sciences. Class has come to take on a broad range of meanings, reaching from the conscious sense of group belonging developed through social and political struggles observed in the context of working class formation; the “hidden injuriesµ of devalued proletarian habitus forms; to the occupational categories of labor market statistics and the electoral blocs identified by cleavage researchers. Conceptions of class changed in tandem with the evolving structures of capitalist societies, with political conjunctures, as well as, not least, with the dynamics of academic fields and their relation to society.