Abstract
Sociological studies of politics often seem to be concerned exclusively with the problem of social class. This approach is no Marxist monopoly. From Aristotle to Adam Ferguson and Disraeli a concern with the distribution of power by indices of social difference was one of the main preoccupations of philosophers and political scientists. In the Politics Aristotle based much of his analysis of stable and unstable societies on the distribution of social groups in relation to the power structure) and defined types of political system by the social class in control: e.g. an oligarchy was government by the rich and democracy was government by the poor. Much subsequent political analysis has explored the relationship between social structures and political power and, like Aristotle, has used ‘ideal types’ of policy in an attempt to analyse comparative political structures. Marx’s contribution was primarily to have activated the classification by arguing in favour of the powerless classes and by basing his theory of politics squarely on conceptions of class struggle. Class, for Marx, was not a static concept but closely related to economic and social change.
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Notes and References
Pitrim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Mobility, Free Press, New York 1959, P. 484.
K. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” in Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1950, p. 303.
H. Gersh and C. W. Mills (eds), From Max Weber, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1948, p. 186.
M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Allen and Unwin, London 1930, pp. 181–182.
E. Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, Free Press, New York 1961, p. 40.
E. Durkheim, Socialism and Saint Simon, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1959, p. 200.
R. Michels, Political Parties, Collier Books, New York 1962, p. 870.
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© 1970 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Davies, I. (1970). Political Theory and Social Mobility. In: Social Mobility and Political Change. Key Concepts in Political Science. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00920-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00920-6_1
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