| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation rehabilitates the concept of social class for contemporary social and political philosophy. In much contemporary work, the concept of class is often uncritically presupposed in an unreconstructed Marxist form, dismissed, or else simply omitted. Further, the history of philosophical and sociological debates over the proper formulation of class, and the comparative virtues of different concepts, has been ignored or forgotten. In this work, I argue that the concept of class is indispensable for social and political theory, but the operative definition must be drastically revised. To accomplish this, I develop and defend a novel conception of class as a socially reproduced real social identity centered work. Like Marxist views, my view sees class as originating in human being’s relation to work, but introduces considerations drawn from theories of race and gender to propose that exhaustion and rest from work typifies class as a social identity. In understanding work as something not only performed but also recovered from, I argue that this view can also simultaneously support a nuanced and sophisticated approach to the political, economic, and institutional features of class as a phenomenon. Lastly, I then show that this conception of class can be rendered as a thick ethical concept which is simultaneously descriptive and normative by virtue of the partial philosophical anthropology inherent to the concept. This provides a normative basis for the critique of societies as classed simpliciter. This potential route for social criticism is favorably compared to others in the tradition of Critical Theory, such as Axel Honneth’s critique of reification. | |
