OVERVIEW OF CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER 4 IS A FRAGMENT OF only three paragraphs: two on social classes, and one on social ranks, Stände. As with Chapter 3, these paragraphs have more to do with classification than with definition, but this is a classification that proved influential in the social sciences of the twentieth century.

First of all, by discriminating between social rank and social class, Weber made clear that while social class grouped men and women according to various objective characteristics, social rank involved a claim founded on positive or negative social estimation. While there had been a general evolution in societies from the dominance of social rank to that of class, these designations were not in themselves historical. In particular, claims to privilege persist in modern societies, and so it is important to separate these out from the more objective criteria of social class that he identified.

Second, the distinction of propertied, acquisitive, and social classes in §1, coupled with a wealth of related characteristics, provided the idea that modern society was class based with a systematic foundation. Whereas social rank depends on social estimation, tradition, and inheritance, the key elements of social class are property and acquisition—as he writes in the penultimate paragraph, “Whereas acquisitional classes originate and flourish in a market-oriented economy, social ranks develop and exist chiefly by monopolising the provisioning of organisation.… A society is a ‘society of ranks’ when the social structure is organised by rank; it is a ‘class society’ when the social structure is organised by class.” Hence, Weber can be said to have outlined here a contrast between the market orientation of classes and the traditional legitimation of social rank.

Sociology in the later twentieth century was strongly associated with the analysis of societies in terms of class and power, and Max Weber provided the basic instruments with which this could be done. However, not only is Chapter 4 a fragment, as a classification of social differentiation it is not clear how it relates either to the action-oriented framework of Chapters 1 and 2, or to the typology of Chapter 3. As I suggest in the Introduction, there are many signs in the later sections of Chapter 2 and in Chapter 3 that Weber had lost a clear perspective on what exactly the scope of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was. The clear transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 is not replicated in the way that Chapter 3 follows on from Chapter 2, and here also it is not obvious how the end of Chapter 3 connects to this new chapter, either in terms of substance, or in terms of analytical approach.

While the analysis of class became a familiar feature of twentieth-century sociology, Weber had not lent the concept any especial analytical significance before; these classifications would come to assume an importance that they did not possess for Weber’s own sociology. Nonetheless, it is clear from the detailed classification that Weber left in the fragment of Chapter 4 that he was capable of providing a template for later sociologies, even if he himself did not make the fact of social differentiation a central element of his own sociology.