The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain

"Class," the greengrocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher once remarked, "is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles, and sets them against one another." The notion of social and economic classes has certainly been a durable one, and it has proven useful to not only Communist theoreticians but also historians and social scientists of all stripes. Nowhere does the idea of class seem quite so powerful as in Britain, writes London University historian David Cannadine in this engrossing study: Although his fellow historians there have largely abandoned class analysis in their work, social distinctions and divisions persist and remain powerful. That historians (notably among them the Marxist scholars E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm) and politicians now prefer to disregard those distinctions, Cannadine believes, is the result of "the shift from the traditional preoccupation with people as collective producers to the alternative notion of people as individual consumers"--the triumph, in other words, of market capitalism. Yet, Cannadine continues, it is through the lens of class that Britons "understand and describe their social worlds," and not through other idealized models. Cannadine examines the work of scholars and political thinkers who have attempted to alter that view, among them Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, whose "main concern was to change the way the British looked and felt and thought about their society and themselves." However well intentioned, such efforts are doomed to failure, Cannadine argues, and although Tories and Labourites promise a classless society to come, the British view will likely remain class-bound. --Gregory McNamee