دانلود کتاب مفهوم کلاس – یک مقدمه تاریخی

As Max Weber said in his lecture ‘Science as a vocation’, the conscious discovery of the concept was one of the most important moments in scientific progress. A concept is an abstract entity with a defined meaning, and it represented for the Greek philosophers a standard of absolute value against which all other things were to be measured. But precisely because a concept is an abstract entity, it has no meaning unless it is given a label, a name. The giving of a name to a concept is an act of labelling, in that we may consciously choose a name for any given concept; on the other hand, the existence of the label does not guarantee the contents of the bottle, in that the abstract meaning attached to that name changes over time, as men and women change their preoccupations and focus on different aspects of the same problem. This book deals with the concept of class. Class is one of the most commonly used of political concepts today. There are literally hundreds of books devoted to exploring aspects of this subject of class, and huge research programmes are in progress to employ it further in the understanding of modern social entities. Curiously enough, however, very little academic attention has recently been devoted to elucidating the use of the concept of class as such. By this I mean that in academic writing, as opposed to a great mass of popular literature, the question currently being explored is not ‘What is class?’ but ‘How does class explain such and such a social phenomenon?’ The purpose of this book, therefore, is simply to ask again the former of these two questions. It follows, therefore, that the preoccupations of this book are somewhat different from those of other writings today in political science and sociology. It does not seek to explore a wide range of literature which assumes the existence of a defined concept of class, except in so far as individual specimens of such books or articles seem to represent a significant transformation of the concept of class as it is currently used. Hence this book is not a general overview of the literature on class, and readers may well find that aspects of the subject which are of particular interest to them are either only sketchily handled or not noticed at all. They may rest assured that this is not because the author does not consider these works to be of importance, merely that they do not come within the confines of the intention of this book as it has been conceived from the beginning. Secondly, and on the other hand, a chapter and a half of this book is devoted to discussing and investigating what we may call the ‘prehistory’ of the concept of class and endeavouring to ascertain, as far as possible, at what point it became a term consciously used and applied to politics and society. This investigation will lead us into the c onsideration o f s ome rather o bscure books and a rticles, and i t involves some detailed consideration of the relationship between words and their meanings. This work, too, has not been undertaken merely out of a pedantic zest for the byways of lexicography; it forms an essential part of the exercise of understanding how concept and label came to evolve and to be brought together. The particular historical circumstances in which they did so was, I shall argue, o f c rucial s ignificance for the f uture, and i ndeed o ur p resent, use of the term. Last, one important lesson of this exercise has been the difficulty – indeed, the impossibility – of confidently translating concepts from one language. to another. Class differs from many other political concepts in that it is precisely the universal application that is claimed for it which gives it its powerful role in modern political discourse. The question of how far we can rely upon this term in changing cultural circumstances is one of fundamental interest. It is my conclusion, as will be seen, that we cannot.