298
GEORGE
LICHTHEIM
term "working class"!
If
only all social problems could be as
easily solved.
Behind this kind of intellectual muddle there lurks what
Reissman calls "the belief in social equality," or to put it dif–
ferently, the notion that "class' signifies "caste." This is an old
story, and by no means confined to America. It has been an
important factor in the rise of democratic movements all over
the Old World. Even today one can hear British public men
of
all parties
declaim about "the abolition of class distinctions,"
i.e., the discarding of outworn and superfluous status symbols.
"A classless society" in
this
sense is simply another name for demo–
cracy. The odd thing is that England, having no significant racial
minorities, probably stands a better chance of reaching this goal
within measurable time than does the United States. However, that
is another story. Let us get back to our four authors.
In view of what has just been said it is not surprising to
find that they are all haunted by the ghost of Marx. This is true
even of Professor Sorokin, the well-known inventor of a rival
system, who might be expected to look with some disdain upon
a mere 19th century theorist, and who does in fact take a rather
lofty view of the matter. His colleagues, being closer to the ground,
are correspondingly more worried. Mr. Reissman is the most
worried of them all, clearly because he knows most about the subject.
Marx crops up in practically every one of his chapters, invariably
to the detriment of the argument, since whenever the fatal topic
rears its head, he takes refuge in obscurity. Even so he manages to
insinuate a good many conclusions that smell distinctly of sub–
version, though wrapped in several layers of academese and deck–
ed out with copious references to Max Weber, Talcott Parsons,
and other authorities of unimpeachable respectability. There is,
for instance, Weber's notion that "the class relations of the
economic order belong at the level of the national society. Rela–
tions at the community level, as a separate analytical dimension,
involve the 'status' order." This was also one of the themes of
The Power Elite,
and all through
Class in American Society
one
can feel the shadow of Mr. C. Wright Mills dogging Mr. Reiss–
man's uneasy footsteps. Whenever this kind of subject comes up,
he assumes the embarrassed mien of a church elder caught play-
