Classes and Interests in the Early American Consciousness

Abstract

To Europeans, it has always been something of a puzzle: despite enormous inequalities in wealth and a high degree of stratification in the social structure of the United States¹, the country’s politics has been singularly unaffected by a class- or status-driven collective consciousness or ideology². This puzzle, apart from remaining puzzling, also creates a social-scientific paradox: the more social scientifists delve into political problems evidently stemming from inequality and stratification, the fewer seem to be the theoretical and empirical payoffs that class analysis, so-called, yields in the domain of politics³.