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Quotations about SOCIAL CLASS
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS TEND TO PROFESS DISTASTE FOR CLASS SYSTEMS (NOT TO MENTION CASTE SYSTEMS); AND AMERICANS REPUTEDLY USED TO BELIEVE THAT 'CLASS' ONLY
HAPPENED IN BACKWARD AREAS LIKE EUROPE. YET, THOUGH THE IDEA OF 'THE CLASSLESS
SOCIETY' ENJOYS CONTINUING POPULARITY AS AN IDEAL, HIERARCHICAL
ORGANIZATION-BASED PRINCIPALLY ON INTELLECTUAL DIFFERENCES-IS PROBABLY A
CONSTANT OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. (DOUBTLESS, FURTHER RESEARCH IN NEW GUINEA IS
TO BE DESIRED.)
In recent years, social scientists have grown chary of offering
'explanations' of social phenomena. When so many social-scientific theories,
prophecies and recipes failed in the past, 'explanation' has seemed too precise
an aspiration . Instead, social scientists have increasingly inclined to refer
merely to people's own 'understandings' of the social world; to their own
'perceptions'; to their 'communication of meaning'; to their 'symbolic
interactions'; to their 'identities'-often 'self-constructed'; and
to their '(false) consciousness'. Purveyors of such mixtures of common sense and
post-modern sociology therefore decry attempts to trace human psychological
differences to age, gender, or race. Just as suspect as such disagreeable group
differences are biologically-based dimensions of difference (such as g)
that might be offered by a differential psychologist as causal stand-ins.
Yet in fact, lurking not far behind this intellectual smoke-screen is the best-known simplificatory variable of the whole lot: social class-or 'socio-economic status' (SES) for the faint-hearted. It is this 130-year-old variable, first popularized by Marx and Engels, that will still be summoned up by sociologists if it is insisted that they distinguish themselves from experts in literature, or when they wish to rouse an audience to revolutionary fervour. In particular, SES is commonly held by sociology's less-postmodernized sympathizers to be capable of most of the explanatory work to which IQ is usually assigned by the London School of differential psychology. Indeed, most labourers in sociology and allied trades would frankly hold the SES of one's parents during one's youth to be the important causal factor influencing one's measured IQ itself, as well as influencing one's finally achieved, adult levels of educational attainment, occupational status and affluence. Social class is the one real group difference that is allowed by sociologists to social science.
How to resolve arguments about the causal importance of parental SES has never been particularly obvious. For example, high-SES foster parents tend additionally to have above-average IQ's: so the 'rich' environment that they provide for their children will consist partly of intellectual stimulation and support that derive less from the father's professional occupation and income and more from the sheer intelligence of his wife and himself. Matters are further complicated for the researcher by the fact that-just as many psychologists are edgy about g- some sociologists will not commit themselves to any particular measure of SES. However great their faith in the existence of a hated over-class and a cheated under-class that awaits their leadership to the barricades, 'non-positivist' sociologists can be as reluctant to measure SES as those political conservatives who abjure the socially divisive 'class' concept as helpful only to revolutionaries.
Lately, important new evidence became available from a natural experiment in France-collected by a team that was appalled to find that the English-speaking world had not itself managed to put down the abominable heresies of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen. Involving separated pairs of half-siblings in homes that were very different in SES, the study found surprisingly modest effects of class-of-rearing on the children's later IQ's (and especially on fluid g as measured by non-verbal tests). Again, modern evidence from both the USA and Ireland (both North and South) is that the SES of parents quite simply shows only a slight correlation (around r = .22) with the educational attainments of children by their early twenties.
Yet it must be doubted whether the West will witness 'the end of class-ism' as quickly as some hereditarian and libertarian thinkers have envisaged (Biology & Society 4, pp. 104-109). The collapse of Eastern-European Communism in ignominy may have sounded the death-knell for the idea that human life is mainly structured by SES and that political endeavour must aim to eliminate class differences; but sociologists normally have a soft spot for Thomas Kuhn's view that discredited ideas can enjoy a long half-life within tenured bureaucracies.
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of social class,
especially in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in April, by the
'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes,
and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on
race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
*******************************************************************
INDEX to QUOTES XXIII
Page
(i) Traditional beliefs in the importance of social class. 5
(ii) What is 'social class' and what are the differences between the social
classes? 7
(iii) How important for a child is the social class of its parents ( and
especially of the apparent 'advantage'
or 'disadvantage' that parents supply)? 12
(iv) The role of individual differences in yielding people's own 'achieved'
social class (in the course of their own lifetimes). 18
(v) Is it a good idea to have some kind of social class system or hierarchy? 21
(vi) Is the West's (and especially Britain's) social class system coming to an
end? 24
Epilogue
(i) Traditional beliefs in the importance of social class
"[Lenin] followed [Marx and Engels] in expressing unabashed admiration
for Jacobin terror - both for the wholesale executions and mass drownings
of condemned prisoners. He used to say that "terror renews a country",
and made no secret of the fact that he was following Babeuf's injunction that
the conquered classes must be completely destroyed.... It was during the time of
the French Revolution that violence came to be meted out according to class
allegiance. Both in name and structure the "revolutionary tribunals"
and even the "extraordinary commissions" (know as "Cheka" in
Soviet times from the Russian abbreviation of this phrase) are based on Jacobin
models."
Alexander SOLZHENITSYN, 1980,
The Mortal Danger. London : Bodley Head.
"We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the
bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that
the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions to
put are:
To what class does he belong?
What is his origin?
What is his education or profession?
And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In
this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror."
LATSIS (Chairman of the eastern front of Lenin's Cheka), 1918.
Cited by G.Hosking, 1987, A History of the Soviet Union.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"....we have a good deal of evidence to show that, right from the beginning
of life, one's life-chances, the chance of surviving birth, of suffering from
certain illnesses, the chances of living in certain types of accommodation, of
receiving certain types of education and, indeed, the likelihood of earning a
given income, are very much related to divisions in our society which we call
social class."
Ivan REID, 1980, The Listener. (Reprinted in I.Reid,
Social Class Differences in Britain. Glasgow : Fontana, 1989.)
"With Marx, class had been an all-purpose weapon in the study of society.
To this day, not only in Germany but most recently in England, where Marxism has
become a pastime of sociologists comparable in attraction to astrology in the
population at large, the cosmic question of Marxian versus Weberian
interpretations of class rages, resembling the Arian versus Athanasian
battle of definitions in early Christianity." R.NISBET, 1982, Prejudices:
a Philosophical Dictionary. Harvard University Press.
"A spectacular illustration of the elimination of social class by the
multiplication of individual variables was provided by the Coleman Report. This
report, published in the United States in 1966, describes the largest
educational study ever made. The sample studied was constituted by a
representative group of more than 600,000 schoolchildren and students.... Among
the 93 independent variables chosen to describe the subjects of the study, the
profession of the parents is conspicuously absent.... Social class in apparently
a European myth!"
M.SCHIFF & R.C.LEWONTIN, 1986, Education and Class:
the Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford : Clarendon.
"The impress of class distinctions is superficial, and may be compared
to those which give a general resemblance to a family of daughters at a
provincial ball, all dressed alike, and so similar in voice and address as to
puzzle a recently-introduced partner in his endeavours to recollect with which
of them he is engaged to dance; but an intimate friend forgets their general
resemblance in the presence of the far greater dissimilarity which he has
learned to appreciate."
Francis GALTON, 1874, English Men of Science.
London : Cassell, 1970.
"The experience of recent years has unfortunately demonstrated that the
petit-bourgeois inclinations of part of the working class are unfortunately
greater than we had earlier recognised."
Statement in 1937 by the exiled German Socialist Party. Cited by M.Burleigh
& W.Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge
University Press, 1991.
(ii) What is 'social class'
and
what are the differences between the social classes?
"The bourgeoisie has been the first [class] to show what man's activity
can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids,
Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.... the bourgeoisie....draws all nations
into civilisation.... it has created enormous cities and thus rescued a
considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.... the
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together."
Karl MARX, quoted in M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book
of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.
"[According to Jonathan Clark, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,] class
did not exist in Britain before Victorian times and so cannot be used, as it
traditionally has been, to explain political developments in Britain from the
Civil War onwards."
P.WATSON, 1988, The Observer, 31 i.
"....anthropometric data should be collected, [Galton] thought, from
different grades of school, as these represented the different grades of
society. In due course, an Anthropometric Committee of the British Association
published a report in which a table appeared, classifying the population into
Labouring and Non-labouring types; the second of these was subdivided into two - Professional and Commercial - and the first into three, and thus the
groundwork was laid for the five social classes used by the {U.K.}
Registrars-General in the earlier part of the twentieth century."
Peter COX, 1988, Biology & Society 5.
"For over fifty years the Registrar General's classification of the
community into five social class groups (plus one 'Not Known'), based upon the
employment of the head of the household, has usefully distinguished the features
of deprivation and privilege seen in many fields, including obstetrics and
perinatology.... Despite a quarter of a century of the Welfare State, obstetric
and perinatal performance, within the relatively small group [of 13,964
first-time mothers of British and European origins] derived from our own
hospital practice, reflected the social class distinctions defined so many
decades ago. The incidences of perinatal mortality, neonatal depression and low
birth weight each increased progressively from Social Class I to Social Class V,
while the incidence of delivery by Caesarean section fell...."
J.S.CRAWFORD et al., 1986, Biology & Society .
"Weinrich (1977, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology 2) [analysing
over twenty studies from the world literature] concluded that the lower the SES,
the earlier the age of first coitus, the greater the likelihood of premarital
coitus and coitus with prostitutes, the shorter the time before engaging in
extramarital affairs, and the less stable the marriage bond."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1990, Journal of Personality 58.
"Eating habits are the principal means of determining rank. The middle
class ingest frozen or health foods. The workers tinned and fatty comestibles.
Vegetarian workers are unknown."
Charles MOSLEY, 1986, Spectator (Competition Entry), 9 viii.
"Income is, of course, both the major determinant of the standard of living
and its usual measure. Perhaps the clearest evidence that it directly affects
health is that as an occupation goes up or down in the earnings league it moves
correspondingly in the death rates league."
Richard WILKINSON, 1987, 'Does poverty equal poor health?'
The Times, 2 iv.
"For the Soviet Union, Zev Katz enumerates six [social] strata:
nachalniks (rulers, or nomenklatura);
intelligentsia;
white-collar workers;
blue-collar workers;
kolkhozniks (those in the agricultural collectives); and
the privately employed....
The societies of "real existing socialism" are not only clearly
stratified, but they contain two different and interacting types of
stratification. To the extent that these societies have modern industrial
economies, they generate class systems that show remarkable similarities to
those existing under industrial capitalism (including their degree of
equality/inequality). But superimposed on this class system is a quite different
system of stratification, in which privilege as well as power and prestige are
linked to political office. Following Max Weber, one may call this a
"patrimonial" system. Privilege goes with the political job, is
bestowed by the ruling elite. Furthermore, as these jobs are "hereditized",
a patrimonial stratum (or, if one prefers, a political class) reproduces
itself, in continuous interaction with the economically functional
classes."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions
about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty. Aldershot, U.K. : Gower.
"J.R.Ackerley (Literary Editor of The Listener, 1935 - 1959)
housed in his lodgings "a shifting population of guardsmen, boxers, petty
criminals and off-duty police constables, along with representatives of the art
world such as....E.M.Forster. [This] set-up sounds rather jolly in P.Parker's
account [A Life of J.R.Ackerly]. But ultimately Ackerley's preferences
spelt heartache and disappointment, for he was seeking an Ideal Friend on the
Greek model, whereas his proletarian pick-ups had more temporary ends in mind.
The unreliability, selfishness and slack personal hygiene of the "so-called
working classes" became a theme of Ackerley's complaints, and Forster
endorsed his criticisms. These views give a comic cast to the
"socialism" of the two authors."
John CAREY, Sunday Times (Books), 17 ix.
"[When younger] I had been too much in contact with working-class people to
share [the] almost pathetic belief [of Kurt Tucholsky and other German
socialists of the 1930's] in the virtues, the clear-sighted revolutionary
attitude, and the political earnestness of the working class. [Tucholsky] fell
victim to what Paul Johnson has called 'the great progressive fallacy - that certain categories of people are intrinsically moral, merely by virtue
of their predicament.'"
Hans EYSENCK, 1990, Rebel with a Cause. London : W.H.Allen.
"According to a recent MORI poll....the average British household possesses
just over 150 books (including fiction, non-fiction and children's books)....
The AB's (the professional and managerial class) average a wall-straining 275
books; C1's (middle executive and white collar) own 193 books; C2's (skilled
working class) possess 127; the rest (unskilled, unemployed, welfare recipients,
etc.) have an average of 79."
'Diary', Sunday Times (Books), 25 ii 1990.
"The idea that the working class is progressive has always been one of the
more amusing socialist myths."
Editorial, The Independent on Sunday, 30 ix 1990.
"'Working-class' is a euphemism I just adore."
'Lady Max' in Paul Theroux's story, 'Lady Max'. Granta 40, 1992.
"....at university I came to believe that the working classes were in the
forefront of progressive thought, which caused me to be ever more stunned by the
slow discovery that the opposite is true. In working men's clubs I was amazed
and disillusioned by the opinions that passed unchallenged around the tables
laden with watery beer, whisky chasers and barley wine. No Colonel Blimp could
have been more nationalistic, more money-fixated, more hang-'em-and-flog-'em,
more unreasoningly racist.... 'fucking' became the only adjective that I ever
used.... I was later to learn at university that working-class speech was as
rich and varied as Standard English. The research was done in New York,
however."
Louis DE BERNIERES, 1993, 'The Brass Bar',
In B.Buford, The Best of Young British Novelists.
Granta 43, Penguin : Harmondsworth.
"The health status of Australian men in terms of premature mortality has
dramatically improved during the period 1966-86, for men of all occupations,
with the greatest improvement being for service, clerical and sales workers, and
the least improvement for process and farm workers. Despite these improvements
the marked differences in mortality experiences remain between higher and lower
socio-economic status men....
Why is it so? In an affluent society which offers social security to all in
need, almost universal access to health and educational services, good housing
for virtually the whole population, abundant food supplies for all and the
virtual absence (with the important exception of AIDS) of serious communicable
disease, and, above all, the absence of the blatant poverty seen elsewhere in
the world, why are there such marked differences in premature death rates
between the different social classes in Australia? In addition, and most
importantly, this study confirms these differences among men who are virtually
all in the workforce and among whom 'poverty' is in an official sense less than
2%....
Health related to personal behaviour appears to be the likely explanation for a
proportion of the differing death rates. Tobacco consumption is directly and
inversely related to social class in Australia, with smoking rates among
professional and technical workers at 17%, and among working class groups at 36%
in 1989. The consumption of alcohol is much higher in working class as compared
to professional class Australian men....
However....an American study (Snowden et al., 1989, Am J. Epidemiol.
130) among members of a female religious order, all of whom had adopted
similar lifestyles since young adulthood, demonstrated that college graduates of
the religious order lived longer and healthier adult lives than their colleagues
who were not college graduates."
J.S.LAWSON & Deborah BLACK, 1993, Journal of Biosocial Science 25.
"To avoid controversy, we deliberately constructed an SES index that uses
the same elements everybody else uses: income, occupation, and education. We did
not have any a priori reason for weighting any of these more heavily than
the others, so we converted them to what are called "standard scores"
and added them up to get our index-all of which would ordinarily have caused no
comment. But when it comes to The Bell Curve, a standard SES index
suddenly becomes problematic...."
C.MURRAY, 1995, Commentary 99.
(iii) How important for a child is the social class of its parents ( and
especially of the apparent 'advantage'
or 'disadvantage' that parents supply)?
{See also Quotes V, X and XVI.}
"To argue that wherever attainments are meagre, ability must also be low,
will always be precarious. Poor health, poor homes, irregular attendance [at
school], lack of interest, want of will - these are far commoner as
causes of inability to spell and calculate than are inherent weakness of
intellect and genuine defect of mind. Certainly, the dull are usually backward;
but the backward are not necessarily dull."
Cyril BURT, 1921.
"....mental output and achievement, as distinguished from sheer innate
capacity, are undoubtedly influenced by differences in social and economic
conditions. In particular, the financial disadvantages under which the poorer
families labour annually prevent three or four thousand children of superior
intelligence from securing the higher education that their intelligence
deserves."
Cyril BURT, 1943, British Journal of Educational Psychology 13.
"[Social class of origin] is the most useful summary index of the complex
of social forces which impinge on the upbringing of an individual."
A.H.HALSEY & I.M.CREWE, 1969, The Civil Service 3. H.M.S.O.
"We have shown that the pattern of relative mobility chances - or,
in other words, of social fluidity - that has been associated with the
British class structure over recent decades embodies inequalities that are of a
quite striking kind. In particular, an enormous discrepancy emerges if one
compares the chances of men whose fathers held higher-level service-class
positions being themselves found in such positions rather than in working-class
ones with the same relative chances of men who are of working-class origins {sic}.
Where the inequalities in class chances of this magnitude can be displayed, the
presumption must be, we believe, that to a substantial extent they do reflect inequalities
of opportunity that are rooted in the class structure, and are not simply
the outcome of differential 'take-up' of....opportunities by individuals with
differing genetic, moral, or other endowments that do not derive from their
class position. At all events, this is the interpretation that must stand, at
least until some latter-day Social Darwinists or Smilesians are able to offer
some alternative account of an empirically credible kind."
J.H.GOLDTHORPE et al. (in a research team based at Nuffield
College, Oxford), 1980, Social Mobility and Class Structure
in Modern Britain. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
"Class inequalities in educational attainment have been consistently large
during the post-war period in Scotland. In the late 1970's, middle-class
children were more than four times as likely as working-class children to
enter an advanced or degree-level course, and they were six times as likely to
enter university."
A.F.McPHERSON & D.RAFFE, 1983, Edinburgh University Bulletin.
"Although it is important to remember that regression analyses....can never
prove that differences in test scores {between children from different ethnic
groups in Britain} are actually caused by differences in social circumstances,
it is at least worth considering the possibility that elimination of some of the
more glaring instances of social inequality might significantly affect
differences in school achievement."
N.J.MACKINTOSH & C.G.N.MASCIE-TAYLOR, 1985, 'The IQ Question'. Appendix D to
Chapter III of Education for All.
London : H.M.S.O.
"Any number of studies show that socio-economic status is the most
important, single component of psychiatric disturbance because of the havoc it
plays with the person's emotional life, not because of any medical illness or
organic impairment, though that may be present too."
Reuben FINE, 1985, The Meaning of Love
in Human Experience. New York : Wiley.
"Our observations show that if the children of workers were placed in the
same family and social environment as the adopted children in our study, their
psychometric and school failures and, in particular, serious failures, would
diminish greatly."
M.SCHIFF & R.C.LEWONTIN, 1986, Education and Class: the
Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford : Clarendon.
"Children from middle-income Nigerian families draw more realistically than
children from low-income families (Pfeffer & Olowu, 1987, Perc. &
Motor Skills 62).... The researchers interpreted their findings as arising
from differences in socialisation."
Psychology News 2, No. 1, 1987.
"In general, demographic variables are excellent predictors of the IQ
score, suggesting that, rather than representing an independent predictor
variable, the IQ score can also be conceptualized as a dependent variable (e.g.
Goldstein et al., 1986, J. Clin. & Exptl Neuropsychol. 8;
Karzmark et al., 1985, J. Clin. & Exptl Neuropsychol. 7;
Loehlin et al., 1975, Race Differences in Intelligence)."
Muriel D. LEZAK, 1988,
Journal of Clinical & Experimental Neuropsychology 10.
"We are driven back once more to the conclusion that potential genius
is probably about as frequent in one class as in another, and that it emerges in
the ratio of its total opportunities."
L.F.WARD, 1906, citing J.M.Robertson with approval.
Applied Sociology. Boston : Ginn & Co.
"Where poverty is so extreme that the child may justly be described as
'deprived', there the IQ as judged by conventional tests is apt to be
misleadingly low, and may exhibit a remarkable improvement after a holiday in
the country with nourishing food and healthier surroundings. Above a certain
minimum, however, the economic condition of the home has little direct or
general influence: the apparent correlation between the children's IQ's and
their parents' income is due mainly to the correlation of each with the
intelligence of the parents."
Sir Cyril BURT, c. 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts of
Intelligence. Croydon, London : J.S.Reid.
"This study has suggested that less attention may well be given in the
future to social class per se with regard to school performance. It is a
crude variable of limited direct importance in the problem of school
achievement."
G.W.MILLER, 1970, Journal of Educational Psychology 61.
"Based on the data presented in these analyses [of 101 different studies of
parental SES and children's academic attainment], it can be concluded that - as
it is most frequently used (with the student as the unit of analysis) and
traditionally defined (using one or more indicators of parents' income,
educational attainment or occupational level) - [parental] SES is positively,
but only weakly correlated with measures of academic achievement. In such
situations, measures of SES can be expected to account for less than 5% of the
variance in students' academic achievement.... Statistically significant findings in studies that use an SES factor in computing an analysis of variance, t-test or chi-squared analysis have probably misled many
researchers about the strength of the relation between SES and academic
achievement."
Karl R. WHITE, 1982, Psychological Bulletin 91.
"....it often seems that the champions of the environment prefer to roll
all domestic and public social influence up into one enormous super-variable of
'deprivation vs privilege'. While lambasting others for their 'simplistic
scientism', social-environmentalists can be surprisingly simplistic
themselves.... the undue emphasis on only one dimension - the social
class dimension - of environmental variance is too simple. [It] makes
allowance neither for the influence of the intellectual levels of [children's]
close acquaintances [especially of family members - see Zajonc, 1983] nor
for [growing children's] positive choice of their own milieus and involvements
from among the {numerous} possibilities that are available to them {in advanced
modern societies}."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, in C.J.Turner & H.B.Miles, The Biology of
Human Intelligence. London : Eugenics Society.
"....the statistical biases in recruitment to the higher civil service-favouring
Oxbridge and the public schools-are at most only trivially influenced by
social bias. The social inequalities reflected in Civil Service recruiting
patterns result from the rigorous application of meritocratic rules and not, as
is sometimes claimed, from failure to observe those rules."
M.MORAN, 1985, Politics and Society in Modern Britain.
London : Macmillan.
"....hyperactivity in early childhood is correlated about -.50 with IQ, and
juvenile delinquents and adult criminals have lower IQ's, on average, than those
of their own full siblings with whom they were reared. [This] proves that the
correlation between IQ and socially undesirable behavior is not just mediated by
differences in social class and cultural background....
A recent study by Robert Gordon (1986), a Johns Hopkins professor of sociology,
shows that IQ statistics are much more powerful for predicting differences in
crime rates between population subgroups in the United States than are any of
the socio-economic variables usually invoked to account for these well-known
racial differences in crime statistics."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, speaking in Blackwood, Virginia.
"Generally, the correlation between social class and delinquency diminishes
or disappears when other family variables are taken into account. Farrington
(1979), for example, found no association between social class and delinquency
when parental monitoring was taken into account."
J.SNYDER & G.PATTERSON, 1987, in H.C.Quay,
Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley.
"....the partialling out [by N.J.Mackintosh and N.Mascie-Taylor {see
above}] of parental SES [from race differences in IQ] is nothing more than a
trick that is so familiar in the annals of simplistic social-environmental
prejudice as to have not even the merit of audacity. Quite plainly it delivers a
result {i.e. a reduced race-difference in IQ} that would equally be
predicted from the theory that parental IQ is importantly causal both to
parental SES and (largely independently, by genetic and interpersonal
transmission) to child IQ.... Parental SES may be correlated with child IQ not
because it is causal to it but because they both derive from the same familial
sources."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Personality & Individual Differences 8.
"....IQ testers are held [by Schiff & Lewontin {see above}] to suffer
from 'brutal pessimism' about the human condition: yet the authors of this plea
for State-orchestrated equalization would strip society of just those artificial
products of capitalism, the 'advantaged' families that alone seem capable of
providing 14- (or possibly 8- ) IQ-point boosts to that small proportion of
working class children that could ever-even under the most Mao-ist
arrangements-be adopted by them."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Nature 325.
"Workers who have a strong sense of class identity need not worry much
about genes and intelligence. The correlation between class and children's IQ in
America has always been low and is getting lower."
J.R.FLYNN, 1987, in S. & C. Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"The Prince of Lignac is lounging on the sun-deck of his [$32M] yacht in
Puerto Banuz, squinting intently at his Rolex watch. He has to twist his wrist
to a particular angle with the sun, for the dial is so studded with sapphires,
rubies and diamonds of such coruscating brilliance that it is not easy to pick
out the hands.... The ungilded chapters of his story book open in 1918 in
Rotterdam, where he was born into a poor family. His father died when he was
three months old, and his mother had to take in lodgers to make ends meet. At
high school he was one of only two boys who had to rely on charity for his study
books, and he never forgot the humiliation of being warned to take particular
care of them so that a boy from "another poor family" could use them
the following year. It was at that moment that young Leo decided that he would,
one day, be very, very rich. He made an unpromising start by deciding on a
career in journalism, but soon went into business on his own account. From
correspondence schools he branched out into publishing and direct mail,
eventually building a business empire comprising 19 companies spread across five
European countries."
Russell MILLER, 1987, The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 vi.
"This report argues that much of the reason social class [and other
demographic variables] have been found to co-vary with criminal behaviour, at
least regarding serious victimful offenses, is to be found at levels of analysis
which involve reproductive biology."
Lee ELLIS, 1988, Personality & Individual Differences 9.
"Rearing-SES effects on IQ in adoption studies have been found for young
children but not in adult samples, suggesting that although parents may be able
to affect their children's rates of cognitive skill acquisition, they may have
relatively little influence on the ultimate level attained."
T.J.BOUCHARD et al., 1990, 'Sources of human psychological
differences: the Minnesota study of twins reared apart'.
Science 250, 12 x.
"....from age 8 onwards the Educated subjects [no arrests by age 26] had
behaved in a more constructive and submissive way than the Antisocial boys, who
had been more aggressive and had poorer concentration [according respectively to
peer and teacher reports, both p<.00005]. ....The socio-economic
status of the family did not differentiate strongly between the two groups.
....the groups did not differ in the family structure, whether intact or
not."
L. PULKKINEN, 1992,
European Journal of Personality 6, 2.
"....the children of the unskilled are more likely to die in their first
year. But the absolute numbers are tiny compared with those in the Twenties.
Thus the numbers of infants surviving per thousand live births are, for Class I,
993, and for Class V, 987. The single most important cause of this tiny absolute
variation is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or cot death, which is probably
related not to income but to sleeping position.... With the deaths of older
adults, the only diseases known to be class-related are smoking-related
diseases."
Digby ANDERSON (Social Affairs Unit, London), 1993, 'The trap of blaming
poverty.' The Independent, c. 31 viii.
"If I were to nominate the biggest sleeper effect to emerge from The
Bell Curve debate, it would be the collapse of SES as a way of interpreting
social problems. The rationale for liberal social policy cannot easily do
without it."
C.MURRAY, 1995, Commentary 99.
(iv) The role of individual differences in yielding people's own
'achieved' social class (in the course of their own lifetimes).
"In Minnesota....Waller (1971, Social Biology 18) found a
correlation of .724 between men's IQ's (measured when they were in high school)
and their adult occupations; but a correlation kof only .32 between their IQ's
and their own fathers' adult occupations."
A.R.JENSEN, 1973, Educability and Group Differences.
London : Methuen.
"....Waller (1971) obtained the IQ scores of 130 fathers and their 172
adult sons, all of whom had been routinely tested during their high school year
in Minnesota. The IQ's ranged from below 80 to above 130 and were related to
social class. Children with lower IQ's than their fathers went down in social
class as adults, and those with higher IQ's went up (r = .37 between
difference in father-son social class difference and difference in father-son
IQ). Such intergenerational social mobility has subsequently been confirmed (Mascie-Taylor
& Gibson, 1978, J.Biosocial Science)."
J. Philippe RUSHTON, 1995, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History
Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishers.
"....I must disagree....with the view put forward by Eysenck in his
book The Inequality of Man, that social class mobility can be almost
entirely explained on the basis of genetic principles. The argument is that
although social class and intelligence are related, there is still hope for the
poorer members of society because the population genes for intelligence are
constantly being reshuffled, leading to upward and downward changes in class
position. Yet apart from shifts at the two extremes - where it is hardly
of any significance - and with the exception of the odd blue-blooded
outcast or lucky road-digger's son, such mobility is manifestly not the
case: it is certainly not enough to satisfy any genuine social reformer."
Gordon CLARIDGE, 1985, Origins of Mental Illness. Oxford : Blackwell.
"....if occupational status were completely dependent on g ability and not at all dependent on adult individuals' SES of origin, the
present advantage of white middle-class children over working-class children
would be reduced by {merely} one third, and the relationship between adult
occupation status and g ability, or IQ, would be correspondingly
increased (L.G.Humphreys, 1984, in C.R.Reynolds & R.T.Brown, Perspectives
on Bias in Mental Testing)."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, Journal of Vocational Behavior 29.
"For Keith Hope's study, As Others See Us (1985, Cambridge Univ.
Press), a random sample of some 600 Scottish boys and an equal number of
girls....who had been tested when they were 11 years old were followed up when
they were 28.... The results are broadly similar to those of Jencks and others
for the United States.... Sixty per cent of Scottish intergenerational social
mobility is explained by IQ"
John RAVEN, 1986, American Journal of Education, pp. 396-399.
"....longitudinal investigations commonly show a substantial predictive
power for IQ, while suggesting only a modest influence of parental SES-especially
upon IQ itself. Likewise IQ turns out to be more predictive of later specific
educational attainments than are attainments predictive of later IQ: so g seems to be the cause, and attainment the effect.... although well-funded
sociological studies of [inter-generational] mobility have sometimes wilfully
declined to take IQ into account {see Goldthorpe et al., above}, Touhey's
(1972, Brit. J. soc. & clin. Psychol.) study found that sons' IQ's
correlated at around .55 with their degree of upward (vs downward)
mobility from the original social position of their own fathers.... [Again,]
siblings are typically very similar in their social backgrounds, yet their IQ's
will only correlate at around .50, thus allowing considerable divergence in
their own final achieved levels of SES"
C.R.BRAND, 1987, in S. & C. Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"In 1930 [in Britain], people of the lowest social class had a 23% higher
chance of dying at every age than people in the highest social class. By 1970,
this excess risk had grown to 61%. A decade later, it had jumped to 150% (D.Black,
1980, Inequalities in Health, London : D.H.S.S.).... the increasing
correlation of health and social class is explainable....when it is appreciated
that removing environmental barriers to health increases the variance accounted
for by genetic factors."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1987, Psychological Reports 60.
"....it seems to me it would be very hard to find an argument against
accepting that whatever it is that makes people score well on intelligence tests
also has the effect of moving them towards the upper levels of the occupational
class structure. A sample of 352 people assembled because of a high score on an
IQ test {all were MENSA members} is examined and it is shown that, while 36% of
[their] fathers were in the top occupational class, 76% of the sons were in that
class."
V.SEREBRIAKOFF, 1988, A Guide to Intelligence and
Personality Testing. Carnforth, Lancashire : Parthenon.
"The fairly strong correlation of intelligence with occupational status has
been documented many times: on the basis of World War I mental testing data by
Yerkes (1921, Memoirs Nat. Acad. Sciences 15) and Fryer (1922, School
& Society 16); and on the basis of World War II data by Stewart (1947, Occupations
26). {Linda} Gottfredson (1984) has made detailed analyses of the roles of
intelligence and education in the division of labor. She presents evidence to
show that: (1) occupations differ in the general intellectual difficulty of the
tasks they require workers to perform on the job; (2) the occupational prestige
hierarchy reflects an ordering of occupations according to that intellectual
difficulty level; (3) jobs that are higher in intellectual difficulty are more
critical to the employing organization; and (4) large differences in
intelligence in the population are evident by early school years and this
distribution is not substantially changed by school or work environments.
Recently (Gottfredson, 1986, J. Vocational Behav. 29), she has argued
that it is virtually hopeless to expect that such differences can be
circumvented in employee selection, even by extensive training programs, because
while it may be possible to teach lower-ability persons certain job skills and
knowledge (if enough time is taken to do so), it is practically impossible to
teach the skills of good judgement and decision making that depend on level of
intellect."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
(v) Is it a good idea to have some kind of class system
or social hierarchy?
"The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in
social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and
caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts
greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed
nearly the whole of what we call civilisation. It cultivated the arts and
discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies and
refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been
inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have
emerged from barbarism.... {However} the method of a hereditary leisure class
without duties was....extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class
had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not
exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him
had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of
anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers."
Bertrand RUSSELL, quoted in The Idler, i-ii 1994.
"....combinations of White slaves and landless White freemen were
referred to as a "giddy multitude" with the potential for overthrowing
the dominance of the planter grandees. "Governor Berkeley despaired of ever
subduing a White underclass of "people where six parts of seven are poor,
indebted, discontented and armed" (A.R.Ekirch, Bound for America)."
M. A. HOFFMAN II (1991). They Were White and They Were Slaves.
New York : Wiswell Ruffin House.
"By deed, [Robert] Owen's communities {in New Lanark, Scotland, and in New
Harmony, USA} have shown that production on a large scale may be carried out
without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands."
Karl MARX, 1845.
"These young people {in the Hitler Youth} learn nothing but to think as
Germans and to act as Germans.... [After four years training, we are not]
prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and
status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party.... [If , after
a further six months,] there are still remnants of class consciousness or pride
in status, the Wehrmacht will take over the further treatment...."
Adolf HITLER, 1938, speech in Reichenberg, 4 xii.
Cited by M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945.
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
"If there is one thing more disturbing than a ruling class based on
privilege, it is a ruling class that believes it deserves its position by virtue
of its intelligence."
Brigitte BERGER (professor of sociology at Boston University),
1994, National Review 46, 23, 5 xii.
"....all [Owen' co-operative communities] were unsuccessful."
Chambers' Biographical Dictionary, 1990.
"Once social class exerted discipline upon taste and desire. So did family
and church. But, in the general upheaval that the egalitarian volcano has
brought about in the modern age, these ancient disciplines are gone or
grievously enfeebled. When Pandora opened the forbidden box, the insects of
avarice, envy, pride, hate, jealousy, and other ills flew out into the world.
The opening up of the social class system has had a comparable effect in modern
society..... the great social revolution of egalitarianism, with its destruction
of all the moral disciplines that once held mankind in check, and its
devastation of the social framework within which these disciplines flourished,
is by now world-wide, and this revolution is a long way from the zenith, even in
the West."
Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices. Harvard University Press.
"Identifying someone's class tells us no more about him than recognizing
someone to be a member of a family.... no one's character, not even his manners,
can be deduced from his class. Nor can anyone's 'interests' be known from his
class....
The British are, as Bagehot said, a deferential nation. But their deference has
nothing to do with servility or self-abasement. On the contrary, they have
always impressed foreigners by their genius for combining deference with
independence, an 'easy mingling of orders' and 'a nice appreciation of the real
merit' of persons, as Mme de Stael put it, along with a universal conviction
that everyone is equal before the law....
[Egalitarians] hate class distinctions not because, as they pretend, they pity
the deprived, but because they hate all distinctions. They consider it a sin to
discriminate between those who know and those who don't, or between the lazy and
the industrious. They are offended by any division of labour and by all
standards. They are outraged by the suggestion that men are different from
mice.... In short, classless society is the dream of those who cannot tolerate
our humanity."
Shirley Robin LETWIN, 1986, The Spectator, 26 vii.
"[The England of Ealing films, of the late 1940's,] is a nation much more
at ease with itself than any over which [the Prime Minister, Mr Major, an
advocate of the classless society] is ever likely to preside, not least because
the class structure the Prime Minister abominates provided security and
predictability while offering incentives for those who wished to move up within
it. This was the world that Attlee (and other ex-public schoolboy socialist
ideologists) began to dismantle. They replaced a social order of privileges and
obligations with a welfare state that first subverted and then destroyed
fundamental human relationships. We are still paying the price for that
destruction today."
Simon HEFFER, 1993, The Spectator, 7 viii.
"On becoming Prime Minister, [Mr Major] was encouraged, for form's sake, to
develop one or two ideas of his own, and hit on the concept of classlessness.
His choice is instructive, for here is another valuable source of comfort for
leaders who have lost their nerve. By indicating that they are themselves of no
higher rank than those they lead, classlessness helps them to imply, however
unwittingly, that no greater courage can be expected of them."
Andrew GIMSON, 1994, The Spectator, 23 iv.
(vi) Is the West's (and especially Britain's) social class system
-and concern with it-coming to an end?
Yes!
"The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth had no time for
national loyalties. They were regarded as atavistic and primitive, and were sure
to be soon forgotten.... This world view can be seen very clearly in that
latter-day Enlightenment figure, Karl Marx, most particularly in his central and
unquestioned contention that class would prove to be a greater source of social
mobilisation than national loyalties. This theory met with sudden death in
August 1914."
John A. HALL, 1985, Powers and Liberties: the Causes and
Consequences of the Rise of the West. Oxford : Blackwell.
"The egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement
of the classless society envisioned by Marx. The economic inequalities that
persist, and in some cases have grown worse, are not an outgrowth of the legal
and social structure of our society but are the legacy of a pre-liberal
past."
Francis FUKUYAMA (author of The End of History),
1989, The Independent, 21 ix.
"Let us dismiss this tripe about the class war. I'm blessed if I know where
one class begins and the other ends."
Ray GUNTER (then an eminent British Labour M.P.), c. 1975.
Quoted (with disapproval of its "crude and blatant reformism")
by B.Matthews, Britain and the Socialist Revolution.
London : Communist Party (Socialist Library Pamphlet No.3)
"Our class system is dying.... Only a very large, rich country can maintain
stability and efficiency without some kind of elite, preferably as open as
possible to talent, but still confident of its abilities and legitimacy. One of
our problems is that our {own} elite has lost that confidence, and many of those
who have pulled and are pulling it down have neither the real self-confidence
not the instinctive "feel" to take its place."
David WATT, 1986, The Times, 3 i.
"It was in 1967 that [an Oxford political scientist, Peter Pulzer,] uttered
his much-to-be-repeated dictum that 'Class is the basis of British politics; all
else is mere embellishment and detail.' Yet already, at that time, it was
ceasing to be true." Peter JENKINS, 1987, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution.
London : Jonathan Cape.
"Several researchers have suggested that social class is no longer as
important a factor in sexual preference and practices as was previously
thought."
E.G.PADILLA & K.E.O'GRADY, 1987,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52.
"Underlying structures of society, like the organised working class, are
breaking up."
John LLOYD (Editor of the New Statesman), 1987,
The Observer (Colour Supplement), 7 vi.
"The social foundation of the principle of division, or class struggle,
[became] blurred to the point of losing all of its radicality. We cannot conceal
the fact that the critical model in the end lost its theoretical standing and
was reduced to the status of a 'utopia' or 'hope', a token protest raised in the
name of man, or reason, or creativity, or again of some social category - such
as the Third World or the students - on which is conferred in extremis the henceforth improbably function of critical subject."
Jean-François Lyotard, quoted by Bart Testa, 1987,
The Idler, v/vi. (Published in Toronto.)
"The [U.K.] Government's ambitions for a third term in office now extend to
the abolition of social class. The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys is
considering substitutes for "social class" as it revises its
occupation-based class categorization for the 1991 Census. Sociologists in
contact with O.P.C.S. maintain the change is a direct result of ministerial
distaste for the "divisive" language of class in official
statistics.... A spokeswoman for O.P.C.S. said ministers were aware of the
discussion, but the motive for the change was criticism of the existing usage as
poorly grounded in sociological theory."
J.TURNEY, 1987, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 30 x.
"[A contentious, semi-official Communist Party document, entitled Facing
Up to the Future,] claims that there is no such thing as a pure class
identity, and that 'increasing numbers of people in modern capitalism occupy
contradictory class locations'. A great swathe of people now exists who can no
longer be described as purely working class for they 'control some kind of
productive asset - skills, knowledge, organisational power over
production.' Most iconoclastic of all, [the document] goes on to proclaim that
this means that 'class cannot straightforwardly provide the collective interest
for modern socialism.'" New Socialist, 1988, x/xi.
"Research carried out among comprehensive school and public school teenage
girls and to be published this week in Sociology, the journal of the
British Sociological Association, will be a bitter blow to the followers of Karl
Marx. It shows that, for the comprehensive school pupils, the classless society
has arrived. Even when pressed, they found it impossible to say what class they
were from, and difficult to name the classes in British society. By contrast,
the girls at an Oxfordshire public school retained an Upstairs Downstairs view
of the world, according to the study by Dr Elizabeth Frazer, a tutor at New
College, Oxford."
Judith JUDD, 1988, The Observer, 21 viii.
"....what was once thought of as the working class had better soon be
called the consuming class - a class of which we are all members. No
party of the opposition has yet learned to adapt itself to this. So much of it
seems inimical to left politics. It seems so acquisitive.
John LLOYD (Editor of the New Statesman), 1989,
Sunday Times (Magazine), 30 iv.
"In 1972, the wealthiest 1% of the adult population [in Britain] owned 31%
of the wealth. By 1987, a social earthquake had struck. The top 1% owned 18% of
the wealth - a drop of almost half. Egalitarians would argue that this is
still completely out of proportion, though Soames Forsyte would be very
astonished at the change. In the Galsworthy days before the first world war, as
Lloyd George brought in his people's budget and took on the massed lordships of
Britain, the top 1% owned 69% of the country's wealth."
Paul BARKER, 1990, Sunday Times, 18 ii.
"There is still a Real Working Class, but it's very small, and shrinking.
It survives mostly in the North and on the Celtic fringes {of Britain}, and only
in company towns, where everyone works in the same pit or the same car plant; an
individual can't by Real W.C. in isolation - working-classness is defined
by community."
Mat COWARD, 1991, New Statesman & Society, 18 x.
"....America is another place where the polite bourgeois culture is losing
its grip. No doubt the move has been greatly encouraged by the arrival of the
hamburger-guzzling President, whose supporters make so much capital out of the
fact that he came from the wrong side of the tracks, i.e. from the lower-middle
class. It would not be polite to invite them to consider that the last five
British prime ministers similarly came from the wrong side of the tracks, and
look where we are now."
Auberon WAUGH, 1994, The Spectator, 2 iv.
"A new study has revealed that [the Young Royals] have shunned the clipped,
conservative pronunciation of the Queen....and are more likely to adopt traits
of speech commonly associated with the classless southern accent known as
estuary English of 'high cockney'. Like millions in the towns and counties of
the Thames estuary who have popularised the new accent, royals such as the
Princess of Wales and Prince Edward are prone to swallowing their t's in
sentences such as 'There's a lo' of i' about'."
Charles HYMAS, 1994, The Sunday Times, 11 iv.
No!?
"Nearly three quarters of [a nationwide British sample of 1,770
people, conducted in 1984,] felt class to be an inevitable feature of modern
society, and half the sample endorsed the view that there is a dominant class
which controls the economic and political system.... [74%] thought is was hard
to move from one class to another."
David BERRY, 1988, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 27 v.
(Reviewing G.Marshall et al., Social Class in Modern Britain.
"....graduated taxation gives old money a leg up over new. It tends to lock
people into place, thereby obstructing class mobility and the rotation of
elites."
T.BETHELL, 1986, The Spectator, 18 x.
"It is important that we point to countries like South Africa where the
working class plays the leading role for social change, providing a powerful
argument against the people who've written off the working class from history
altogether and those who preach 'new realism' in the labour movement...."
Direct Action ("the voice of anarcho-syndicalism",
the paper of the Direct Action Movement - International
Workers' Association), 1987, No.42.
"Contemporary Western societies are characterised by a protracted conflict
between two classes, the old middle class (occupied in the production and
distribution of material goods and services) and a new middle class (occupied in
the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge).... a large proportion of
this knowledge class depends for its livelihood on government payrolls and
subsidies.... like all rising classes, the knowledge class rhetorically
identifies its own class interests with the general welfare of society, and
especially with the downtrodden (just as the early bourgeoisie did in its own
conflict with the ancien r¨¦gime)."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution.
Aldershot, U.K. : Gower.
"We are moving from three-tier, class-based societies to two-tier,
occupation-based societies. On top, the specialist, well-educated 10 to 15 per
cent - us; below, the rest in a large, ill-educated mass, fed by the
opiates of consumer-communications. And, at the very bottom, there may be a
hardly educated under-class whom we would prefer not to recognize."
Richard HOGGART, 1988, The Times, 11 vi.
"One of the most important social groups in modern France are the so-called cadres. The occupational groups that constitute the cadres-middle-to-high
level administrative personnel-are present in almost all advanced
industrial societies, but it is only in France that they have formed a conscious
collectivity."
Publisher's announcement, 1988, for L.Boltanski,
The Making of A Class. Cambridge University Press.
"Social status seems to be a 'universal' in human societies, though in many
modern groups it is decoupled from reproductive success by contraception."
G.A.HARRISON, 1989, in M.Keynes et al.,
Evolutionary Studies. London : The Eugenics Society.
"[John Westgaard, 1995, Who Gets What?] has little trouble showing
that a sharply unequal British class system survives, with a top one per cent
forming the capitalist core, a further 2-3 per cent occupying the top rungs of
the professions and the peaks of government and 30 per cent being the
best-placed salariat.... [His] book testifies most effectively to the salience
and strength of Marxist sociology long after Marxism has been pronounced
dead."
F.WEBSTER, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 12 v.
"....an underclass of underemployed or underpaid workers seems to be
growing {in US and UK, 1975-1995}.... Professor Steve Nickell at Oxford has
recently published studies on the people he calls "low-eds".... ....as
more people ascend the educational ladder those left behind are presumably, on
average, less bright. The underclass may actually be getting smaller, but it is
being left further behind; A welter of data supports the impression of labour-market
collapse for the low-eds."
Robin MARIS, 1995, 'Worrying fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon
underclass.' The Times, 28 ix.
Epilogue
"I propose briefly to examine four methodologies: deconstruction {opposing 'logocentrism', i.e. verbal truth}, feminist criticism {detecting omnipresent'patriarchy'}, the New Historicism {the search for
the 'bourgeois subject', the deplorable post-Renaissance modern personality} and film theory
{opposing narrative realism and the 'depth illusion' of post-1919 cinema}.
At first sight, the four would appear to be as widely separated and seemingly
unrelated to one another as could be imagined. Each has its own barely
penetrable terminology and claims to employ a unique analytic method. But the
terms encountered in going from one to another of the four turn out to be many
ways of representing the same few things. In fact, all four methodologies come
down to being versions of a single, surprisingly elementary concept: that of
class struggle. ....the methodologies do not really make discoveries about
reality. Their purpose is to create a political drama in which their
practitioners first invent an exploiting and an exploited class, and then, in a
kind of symbolic imitation of political revolutionism, proceed to deride the one
and identify with the other."
Peter SHAW (1990), 'Making sense of the new academic disciplines.'
Academic Questions 3.
"Had the Third Reich survived, the S.S. would have replaced all existing
social elites. As Hitler said in 1941, 'I do not doubt for a moment, despite
certain people's scepticism, that within a hundred years or so from now all the
German elite will be a product of the S.S.-for only the S.S. practises
racial selection.' The S.S. was a microcosm of the modern, racially organized,
hierarchical, performance-orientated order with which the Nazis wished to
replace existing society. The S.S. would have absorbed or destroyed all
alternative bastions of power occupied by the traditional elites."
M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, 1991, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945.
Cambridge University Press.
"Now that the class system has lost almost all its power, it is worth
saving. For class contributes to the cultural diversity of our country. It is
the indigenous multiculturalism of our people. If we can make room for the
mosque, why not the country mansion? If we can enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival,
why not the Trooping of the Colour too?"
Julie BURCHILL, 1992, 'Who needs a classless society?' Options, x.
"[The] quietly spoken middle classes hate the profiterole-throwing (and
much more honest) middle classes far more than anyone else does. The
food-throwers' brash celebration of their privilege is threatening to undermine
the whole show. To maintain that the power-crazed classes keep each other in
check. So we constantly remind each other of our guilt and of our isolation from
the masses. At least it might prevent us from talking too loudly about out
salaries in the pub."
Daisy WAUGH, 1994, 'Class act.' The Idler iv/v.
"[In David Buss's study of 37 cultures] the single best predictor of the
occupational status of a man was the physical attractiveness of his wife."
A.IRWIN, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 19 v, p.17
FINIS
{Compiled by Christopher Brand, Department of Psychology, University
of Edinburgh}
For more coverage of social class,
especially in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But
Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern
"educationalists". This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in April, by the
'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes,
and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on
race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of 'P, B & S.'
Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group differences,
compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh University Psychology
Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements in the study of
Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing-especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles' and cultural
attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage out'?
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