7. We have assumed so far that class barriers are insurmountable. This is in accord with a very widespread popular notion that not only governs our evaluation of and emotional reaction to matters in the field of class, but has also gained entry into scientific circles—for the most part only as a half-conscious axiom, attaining the dimensions of an axiomatic rule only in the case of Marxist analysis. The modern radical critique of society often rests on this asserted law, which we must now discuss. There is, of course, also the question of whether classes as such, without respect to their component elements—their totality, apart from their component cells—endure in perpetuity and in their relative positions, or at least would so endure unless there were upheavals changing the environment. But this question we shall avoid by simply assuming that the answer is affirmative.
It is noncontroversial that the class situation in which each individual finds himself represents a limitation on his scope, tends to keep him within the class. It acts as an obstacle to any rise into a higher class, and as a pair of water wings with respect to the classes below. This is so self-evident that we shall leave it to the reader to enumerate the factors that exert this effect—class type, relations with class fellows, power over outward resources adapted to the class situation, and so on. Whatever historical period, whatever set of social circumstances we may select, we shall always be able to make two assertions that are not likely to be successfully contradicted: In the first place, only in very exceptional cases—so exceptional that they are of no particular significance to the explanation of social processes—is it possible for an individual to enter a “higher” class at a single bound. An example might be a position of sovereignty, achieved by virtue of a coup d’état, affording the usurper immediate entry into the top levels of the aristocratic class.1 A sudden downfall from the class to which one once belonged, constitutes, so far as I can see, no more than a mischance devoid of basic interest. In the second place, it is as a rule practically impossible for the physical individual to effectuate the transition to a higher class for himself; and in the overwhelming majority of cases it is impossible for him during his own lifetime to modify decisively the class situation of the true class individual, the family. The occasional cases, however, in which one or the other of these eventualities may occur can no longer be put aside as “basically uninteresting” exceptions.
But it is equally clear, that in our case the relatively short periods under consideration eliminate the phenomenon in question. As soon as we consider longer periods—family histories, for example—the picture becomes different. There we encounter the fundamental fact that classes which in character and relative position must be considered to consist of identical social individuals never, in the long run, consist of the same family individuals—even if we subtract those that become extinct or drop down to a lower class. On the contrary, there is constant turnover. Entries and exits occur continually—the latter directed both upward and downward. Class composition is forever changing, to the point where there may be a completely new set of families. The rate at which this turnover proceeds varies greatly for different historical periods and social situations. Within each situation it varies for individual classes, and within the latter for individual families. There are cases in which membership in a given class does not even endure for the lifetime of a physical individual; and others in which it lasts for many centuries. Indeed, at first glance such cases of class longevity are unduly prominent, even though they constitute quite rare abnormalities. This difference in the rate of interchange is highly instructive and carries the greatest significance for the verification of our basic idea as well as for an understanding of important social questions. The process always goes on, though at times extremely slowly and almost imperceptibly, impeded by legal and other barriers which every class, for obvious reasons, seeks to erect. For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.
Precise demonstration of this fact is important not so much as an end in itself—since it can scarcely be disputed—but rather on account of the insight it affords into the rate of social upsurge and decline, and into their causes. Again, we must rest content with a few remarks on the subject. The fact that entry into and exit from a class takes place on an individual basis does not violate the rule that these actions also have their corporative aspect, as it were—that they are of themselves class processes, independent of the behavior of individual families, which indeed, look upon them as “objective” processes. Nevertheless, it will be seen to be the rule and principle that entry and exit are individually effected by each family. It is not merely a matter of addition and subtraction from a basic stock of families created in some other way; the basic stock itself lives and dies solely by this process of the entry of new families and the exit of old ones. We do not deny that appearances point in the opposite direction. This is always true where a body changes by continual turnover of its parts, arising by continual building up and declining by continual tearing down. At any given moment there is a relatively stable basic stock that seems like a solid core—which it is in a certain sense, but not in the sense that concerns us here.
8. Our demonstration can best be conducted in cases where individual families can be identified and genealogically traced. This is increasingly possible, with the progress that has been made in genealogical research, though there is always likely to be an insurmountable barrier in the dim past. At the present time, really satisfactory material is available only for the aristocracy, notably the high nobility. Sources such as the Golden Book of the Roman aristocracy do offer the evidence we seek. Only a few of the original families were still listed in the seventeenth century, and we can observe precisely how the new names came to be added. In the case of the German high aristocracy, the families, as a rule, cannot be genealogically traced back beyond the year 1200. Yet the broad outlines of the picture emerge, nevertheless. We know, above all from the common law, that at their very entry into history the Germans already had a high nobility that bore the earmarks of a social class. In the case of the Bajuvari, for example, we even know the names of the families. These particular families vanished—in the case of the Bajuvari we later encounter similar names in the ministerial estate—yet a high nobility as such remained. Even earlier, however, new families entered that class, and this happened on a large scale during the Carolingian period, and again under the Ottonians and Salians. We see it more clearly after the eleventh century, when the documentary evidence for a time distinguishes between names belonging to the high and the low aristocracy. We are able to establish that in the thirteenth century the dividing line between freedom and unfreedom paled, that families that were formerly unfree household officials ascended to the high nobility. Again, by the fifteenth century virtually all the families of the thirteenth-century high aristocracy were extinct or had declined—yet the class lived on. Despite legal and economic fixations, the barriers remained in a state of flux. This is precisely what constitutes the difficult legal problem of “peerage.” It is significant for our purposes that there is no clear legal method for defining either the concept or the content of the high nobility as a class—indeed, that the genealogist resists any such attempt. Whenever a family had achieved success, gained wealth and prestige, it was accepted by its superiors, whatever its origin or former status; when it went into a decline, it was suddenly no longer considered to be equal. There were frequent intermediate stages that illustrate this continual process. Occasionally connubium existed between the rising families and those already arrived, though the offspring of such unions still required the formal act of “freeing.” But after a while even this requirement lapsed, and any memory of class distinctions ceased. It remained true that the more firmly class position was established, the more difficult it was to surmount the barriers. Yet they were surmounted time and again, after the fifteenth century as well as before. The great Austrian families of German blood, for example, sprang almost exclusively from the ministerial estate. And more and more, proven service to the sovereign became the key that opened the door to the circles of the high nobility. Just as that class continually gained recruits from the class of knights, so this class replenished itself, down to the eleventh century, from the peasant class. Until then there was no legal barrier to prevent the peasant from becoming a “knight.” All he needed to do was to secure a mount and arms, and to prove his worth in battle. Whoever reached this economic estate and demonstrated his usefulness in war service, normally received a “service” fief, and though this was not the equivalent of “genuine” enfeoffment, it established his identification with the warlike master class. This particular procedure lapsed more and more, because the technical qualifications of knights steadily rose from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and because the established class grew more “firm.” But that does not affect our principle. And the cases of the “bourgeois knight” and the “knightly bourgeois” are analogous.
But when we make the leap to the industrial world of capitalism, the lack of genealogical material becomes even more keenly felt. True, such data are being accumulated, if only under the spur of modern genealogical interest as such; but the lack of zeal with which social scientists gather and evaluate this material is in lamentable contrast to the fact that it alone can provide a reliable knowledge of the structure and life processes of capitalist society. Only a fundamental indifference to scientific problems as such can explain the slow progress of social science, a fact which is nowhere more obvious than here, where nearly everyone is satisfied with party slogans. We do have, nevertheless, a considerable number of histories covering industrial, intellectual, and even working-class families. A beginning has also been made in preparing collections of family histories. One such collection, by Professor Haensels (Moscow), exceeds a thousand entries.2 The picture that emerges is uniformly along the lines of the American saying: “Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.” To an even greater degree it bears out our thesis, that the content of every “upper” class is not merely modified but actually formed by the rise and decline of individual families; and that the demonstrable transgression of class barriers is not the exception but so much the invariable rule in the life of every upper-class family that despite certain variations in detail, we are not likely to meet with great surprises.
The most interesting question, of course, is to what extent industrial families are recruited directly from the working class and, to that extent, form no more than the upper layer of that class. (In this connection it is best to avoid the term “elite” which is often and without justification used in the sense of a positive evaluation.) An ordinary census will serve to answer this question, and we have Chapman to thank for such an inquiry.3 He studied the English cotton industry and found that between 63 and 85 per cent of the entrepreneurs and other leaders had risen directly from the working class (that is, the results of the various subinquiries lay between these limits). True, the factual basis was narrow, the methods were imperfect, though painstaking and praiseworthy for a first step. The textile industry, moreover—especially the English textile industry—is not typical. But for our purposes the size of the percentage etsablished by Chapman is not necessary—10 per cent would have been entirely sufficient, provided it could be demonstrated that the ancestors of the remaining 90 per cent had similarly risen from the working or other classes. Even then the theory of an “objective” bond between family and class would have been proved redundant. In other words, the worker, for example, would be objectively tied to his class only in the sense that he ceases to be a “worker” when he deserts his class.4
9. We see therefore that our earlier assumption as to the insurmountability of class barriers for individual families does not accord with the facts. The persistence of class position is an illusion, created by the slowness of change and the great stability of class character as such and of its social fluid. Class barriers must be surmountable, at the bottom as well as at the top. Otherwise how explain that at sufficiently distinct points in time we always find different people in classes that are identical as such, just as we deal forever with different individuals in families that nevertheless remain identical? Like the birth and death of individual family members, which are always events that transcend the everyday course of events and thus constitute something exceptional, entry into and exit from a class appear to us as special and in this sense exceptional events; but in another sense they are entirely normal. We see, therefore, that families do surmount class barriers, as individuals rather than as a class—though quite often in groups—and that they do this in a manner which we can, even today, study in a sufficient number of individual cases, as well as in all important groups of cases. But this process does not yet explain the formation of classes as such. It does explain, as already stated, not only the gradual modification of the basic family stock in a class which might have been created in some other way, but also the formation of whatever stock exists at a given point in time. Only the physical individual, not the family, is class-born.
The question of how this process of surmounting class barriers takes place and why class content changes now answers itself. Primarily it happens precisely as does the shifting of position of individual families within the class. It is only necessary to examine the reasons for those shifts which we have cited in order to see at once that they are quite adequate to account for the rise and fall of individual families not only within the class but also between classes. The family in question only needs to be near the upper or lower border line of its class, and the factors that account for shifts to be strong enough to surmount the barriers peculiar to classes. These barriers are not really different in kind, only in strength, from those that limit the rise or decline of families within the class. It is seen at once that these factors actually do account for the rise or fall of a family above or below its class barriers. As a rule, such changes occur imperceptibly. Only where law or custom confers on members of certain classes certain formal qualifications—such as special political privileges or the right to perform certain religious ceremonies—is there a recognizable outward act that can be dated. And in such cases one might actually be led to believe that it is not so much a matter of voluntary ascent as a process of being pushed up the ladder from the outside. This, however, is not so. Even in such cases it is actually a matter of growth, of first creating a position which is then recognized to be a fact, in the face of which such acts as admission and appointment are merely corroborative. It is apparent that the admission of certain families to the councils of counts [Grafenkollegien] in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not establish the social position of those families but were merely expressive of that position—although it is equally clear that such action did qualify the families in question for membership in those councils and for the rather insignificant privileges linked to such membership. The heart of the matter is much more clearly expressed in the essentially similar process during the Middle Ages in which a family was actually received into the circle of princely lieges, with no particular formal ceremony. The fact that certain barriers may have actually been insurmountable for centuries on end becomes a special reason why there should be no special ritual act governing the acceptance of new families. But this is the case only where ethnic differences exist—the Indian caste system is the outstanding example—and has nothing to do with the essential nature of the class phenomenon.
Yet there is an apparently new element, entirely absent in shifts within the class, the significance of which must be sought here. Apart from favorable or unfavorable accidents, we have considered it to be the rule, in cases of ascent or descent within the class, that the class member performs with more or less success than his fellows those activities that he must perform in any event, that are chosen by or imposed on him within his class limitations. For example, a member of a military or priestly master class may have more success than his fellows with his feuds or prophecies; a tailor may serve his customers better than other tailors; the professional may win a larger number of cases or cure a larger number of patients than other lawyers or doctors. But there is, of course, still another way that is particularly apposite to the transgression of class barriers. That is to do something altogether different from what is, as it were, ordained to the individual. The knight may become a statesman or administrator; the cleric may suddenly enhance the standing of his family by virtue of a career in the service of the Papal See—as a study of papal nepotism down to the end of the eighteenth century shows; artisan families like the Wurmsers and Fuggers may develop into great merchant dynasties; the modern worker may, in familiar fashion, push his son into the so-called new middle class, or, as we have seen, himself become an entrepreneur—which does not, of itself, constitute class position, but leads to class position.
Reverting to the element of chance for a moment, the likelihood of lucky accidents naturally increases when position is enhanced for other reasons, a circumstance which constitutes the other aspect of the relationship between luck and ability. The first and most important aspect we have already mentioned. Family and social history show that, in addition to the elements of chance and success along wonted and ordained lines, the method of rising into a higher class which we are now discussing is of crucial importance—the method of striking out along unconventional paths. This has always been the case, but never so much as in the world of capitalism. True, many industrial families, especially in the middle brackets, have risen from small beginnings to considerable or even great wealth by dint of hard work and unremitting attention to detail over several generations; but most of them have come up from the working and craftsman class—to a lesser degree, and then only indirectly, from the peasantry (I pass over the transition of members of the free professions to industry, because this does not necessarily imply transgression of a class barrier)—because one of their members has done something novel, typically the founding of a new enterprise, something that meant getting out of the conventional rut. Because of the limited opportunities open to working-class families, this is virtually the only method by which they can make the great leap out of their class.
Even though this is another and different way of rising, the conditions under which a family can follow it with success are, from our viewpoint, no different from those under which position is enhanced within the class. This statement applies only to our own viewpoint, for from other viewpoints and for other purposes it is often relevant that the method is a different one, that to move with assurance outside the rut, to do something special that has not been done before in essentially similar fashion, requires different qualities. This latter aspect of launching out into the unprecedented is not, by the way, necessarily implied in every case, though it does play a part in certain important cases and is basically significant to our further line of reasoning. For the present we may say that the capacity and ability to rise socially along this second line requires nothing more than a stronger endowment with the same or similar qualifications that bring success along the first line. Those factors that account for shifts in family position within the class are the same that account for the crossing of class barriers.