Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2026
This chapter starts out by looking at the complexity of how people situate themselves within a stratum of class differences, including the example of a woman who believed that there are 28 class categories. Class studies were a bedrock of popular sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, and much of this focused on working men and women who were unsure about what their class position was in this changing world. While many commentators believed that class was locked into types of employment, one commentator in particular took the feeling of class to be particularly important. The Jamaican-born intellectual Stuart Hall, who had been in Britain since 1951, observed that consumer society brought with it a feeling of classlessness for many. Hall saw the feeling of classlessness to be a symptom of both change and confusion. Hall took seriously the idea that being classless wasn’t an option in class society but that feelings of classlessness were part of the contradictory experience of modern life and something that left-wing politics had to face up to.
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