Max Weber: Selections in Translation

(1) ‘Class situation’ means the typical chances of material provision, external position and personal destiny in life which depend on the degree and nature of the power, or lack of power, to dispose of goods or qualifications for employment and the ways in which, within a given economic order, such goods or qualifications for employment can be utilised as a source of income or revenue.

‘Class’ means any group of human beings which shares a similar class situation. A ‘property class’ is one in which differences in propertyownership primarily determine the class situation. An ‘income class’ is one in which the chances of utilising goods or services on the market primarily determine the class situation. A ‘social class’ is the totality of those class situations, between which mobility either within the lifetime of an individual or over successive generations is a readily possible and typically observable occurrence.

Associations based on common class interests (or ‘class associations’) may arise within any of these three categories of class. But this is not necessarily the case: the terms ‘class situation’ and ‘class’ in themselves refer only to situations in which an individual finds himself sharing the same, or similar, typical interests with a number of others.