Petty Property: the Survival of a Moral Economy

Abstract

As sociologists it would be easy to find points of disagreement with the notion of class expressed in the preface of E. P. Thompson’s celebrated study of the making of the English working class, but whatever its shortcomings, his approach has the considerable merit of forcing us to think seriously and precisely about actual social relationships. In this chapter we want to look at the character of those social relations in which men and women of the petite bourgeoisie are set, at the class experience of those who, in so much of the literature, are ignored or crudely caricatured. As in so many discussions of class, we encounter awkward problems of definition flowing from different traditions of writing, different theoretical stances and different substantive interests. In the previous essays we have brought together accounts which relate to small farmers in a developing colonial territory, small farmers set in and working for a modern capitalist economy, artisanal bakers in France, small businessmen in a socialist country and craftsmen and petty capitalists in developing countries. In what sense can such a diverse occupational set be said to have anything in common? On one thing we can surely agree: these are neither bourgeois nor proletarians. At the same time it is clear that they are unlike the routine white-collar workers in industry, commerce or public administration and they are different too from the bureaucratised professionals or salaried intelligentsia.

I do not see class as a ‘structure’ nor even as a ‘category’ but as something which in fact happens … in human relationships…. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. (Thompson, 1968, p. 9)