The Rise and Fall of the Weberian Analysis of Class in South Africa between 1949 and the early 1970s

Seekings, Jeremy

The Rise and Fall of the Weberian Analysis of Class in South Africa between 1949 and the early 1970s

Journal Article

2008

Journal Title

Journal of Southern African Studies

Link to Journal

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjss20/current

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Centre for Social Science Research(CSSR)

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The hegemony of Marxist approaches to the study of stratification in South Africa has obscured the prominence of Weberian contributions between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Some of these Weberian studies focused on the nascent black middle class, paying particular attention to the importance of status. Others, influenced by the literature on the American South, used the concept of caste as an extreme form of status in analysing the relationship between race and class in South Africa. Whilst flawed, these studies did directly address aspects of South Africans' everyday lives – and especially interactions – that the subsequent structural Marxists side-stepped and with which neo-Marxist social historians struggled.