Combining this historical analysis of philosophical arguments with an interdisciplinary engagement with contemporary sociologists employing clear and contrasting definitions of class for empirical research, I construct an outline of the definitions of class being used in contemporary social and political philosophy and their implicit-and often conflicting-claims about the structure of social inequality or the kinds of solutions one might propose for minimizing or eliminating class as a phenomenon. First, through historical research, I show that there had in fact been debates on what ‘class’ should mean, especially among Marxists throughout most of the twentieth century disputing what constituted a distinct kind of ‘relationship’ to the means of production, what kind of thing class was, and the political implications of different answers. My dissertation attempts a two-step response to these questions. For example, is one’s class a matter of the kind of job one works, the one’s relative amount of money and assets, cultural attunement to certain customs deemed ‘high’ or ‘low’, a relationship to the means of production, or some unintuitive combination of these and other factors? And for what reason ought one to use one sense of the word as opposed to another? Or is the very concept muddled and meaningless, such that we should abandon it? My interest in class emerged from a slow realization that although a vocabulary of class inequality or injustice has proliferated in both mainstream anglophone discourse and political philosophy in the last decade, very rarely is it explicitly defined. While focusing primarily upon the intellectual milieu of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of the key concepts I am interested in are violence, democracy, and in my dissertation in particular, social class. The hope is that through historical work that occasionally leaps into ahistorical comparisons, a more clear-sighted use of political concepts in contemporary political-philosophical debates might be able to resolve conflicts-or at least clarify abiding commitments-at the level of differences over definition. Methodologically, I find there to be untapped value in bringing strikingly different authors or debates into conversation in order to reveal strange resonances or controversial consequences of this or that view. My research works within the overlap between social and political philosophy, which study normative and descriptive arguments and concepts pertaining to collective human engagement, and the history of philosophy, which organizes research by contextualizing philosophical arguments in terms of their social, political, cultural, and intellectual situation. Posted by Teresa Tripp on Monday, Apin Uncategorized.Įmerson Bodde is a 2022-23 Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of Philosophy A Philosophy of Class in the Twenty-First Century
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