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GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
of people who are not only propertyless but socially dispossessed
and excluded from the ordinary life of the community: people
who form the great bulk of the five million more or less perm–
anently unemployed, and who in addition suffer from various
racial and social stigmata of a kind practically unknown in other
Western countries. These people, as any visitor can perceive with
the naked eye, are not merely slum dwellers-to find the equiv–
alent of the Negro slums in some of the less affluent parts of the
USA one has to go to North Africa: there is nothing like it in
Europe, not even in Spain-but they exist at the lowest rung of
aware: the fact that the United States is unique in the Western
world in having a genuine proletariat-meaning a sizeable stratum
a social pyramid whose slopes they cannot possibly hope to climb.
When this state of affairs is considered in the light of the demo–
cratic ethos, it is scarcely surprising that some Americans should
display signs of uneasiness, and that a good deal of recent liter–
ature should be devoted to an agonising reappraisal of the
familiar assertion that all, or nearly all, inhabitants of the United
States belong to the "middle class."
It
must be said, however, that this aspect of the matter
is
not foremost in the works here under consideration. Although
their authors, like most of their countrymen, are fascinated by the
subject of class-indeed hardly able to talk about anything else-–
they do not, for the most part, approach it in a straightforward
manner; nor are they primarily concerned with the two-thirds of
their fellow-citizens who belong to the industrial working class,
let alone the sizeable stratum at the bottom of the social heap;
their existence is more or less taken for granted. What really inter–
ests these writers is the stratification to be found within the
remaining one-third. This is doubtless natural: sociologists, like
other scholars, are themselves members of the middle class, and the
problems of this group inevitably loom large in their eyes. But it
does lead to a marked emphasis on "status questions" which are
not, strictly speaking, germane to the issue of class in the wider
socio-political sense. This is recognized by Mr. Reissman, whose
work is altogether distinguished by a certain cautious willingness
to look facts
in
the eye. The currently fashionable concern with
social classification is due, he thinks, to "the shift from the
