My Five-Star Bookshelf, Part Twenty-One

Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class

The Moral Significance of Class is another crucial book — perhaps the most crucial book — from my dissertation work. As Sayer makes clear, class is not merely a matter of income, a level of education, or a practice of manners. Class has to do with the constant conflict between those who have power and those who don't, and this conflict necessarily has a moral edge. From the opening words of the book — "Class is an embarrassing and unsettling subject" — Sayer reminds us that a different world is possible; this social organization is only one of the options, and when we make choices that reduce the dignity and social participation of others, those choices also have a moral edge.

Discovering this text helped me to feel confident to take a normative position in my dissertation, which is to say that I make judgements in my diss: I argue that what is isn't good enough and could be better. These are unusual claims in a dissertation, but they felt — and feel — right for me.

What I particularly like about this text is that it's written in a strong voice with a wry sense of humour. For instance, at one point Sayer remarks, "class inequality would not be acceptable if only the dominant classes were nicer!" It is also deeply engaged in human dignity, as this comment shows: "The appropriate response to situations in which goods (whether objects, behaviours or institutions) are monopolized by particular groups is to enable equal access to them. The appropriate response to situations in which 'bads' are unequally distributed is to eliminate them, not distribute them more equally."

I refer to Sayer's work throughout my dissertation, although moreso for research methods than for his discussion of class. Still it is this book, and this treatment of class, that provided a significant breakthrough and energized my final few months of writing. Which of course changed my life.