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"This accessible introductory text offers an engaging and thought-provoking discussion of class in relation to several cultural, sociological and political schools of thought and draws upon the works of a broad range of key theorists as well as contemporary thinkers to restate the ongoing importance of class as a sociological concept. Class has long been a key focus of sociological and political studies. This book explores what it might mean today in a 21st century context. Is class really disappearing? Is class morally justifiable? What impact has globalisation and neoliberalism had on the restructuring of class-based social relationships? These questions and others are explored in this short but lively book. Stevenson reviews a number of normative traditions including anarchist, Marxist, social democratic and citizenship-based forms of understanding of class in order to shed light on the themes of class-based experiences, health and inequality, work, class struggle, social movements and the possibility of developing more egalitarian and just societies in the future. This short book will be invaluable to general readers and students in the humanities and social sciences seeking an accessible introduction to the central problems raised by discussions of class in the 21st century"--

The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nield
do not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-based
thinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands of
the authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for human
emancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presented
enormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley and
Nield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but their
vague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics of
overblown significance.

In arguing for more finely nuanced and inclusive understandings of class in the USA, I write as a 'poverty-class scholar' articulating an identity, experience, marginality, and concomitant consciousness and epistemology distinct from that of working-class academics. Both in and out of academe, representations of working-class identity are juxtaposed against and, thus, reinforce the 'otherness' of poor women who are positioned as boundary markers, demarcating the unacceptable and illegal 'others' of the working class. Concomitantly, in claiming to speak for and then neglecting these differences, working-class scholarship allows for the cooptation, erasure and mis-representation of poor women and children. Ultimately, I argue that only by including theories generated 'from experience outward,' that expose and critique the differential impact of class on women's lives without claiming an uncontestable authenticity, can we begin to understand the operations of class as it is lived, theorized and contested in contemporary society.