This definition of class in terms of market-determined life chances is clearly linked to the third question posed above: “What explains inequalities in economically-defined life chances and material standards of living?” Weber’s answer is: in capitalist societies the material resources one brings to market exchanges explain such inequalities in life chances. But even more deeply, Weber’s conceptualization of class is anchored in the fourth question, the question of how to characterize and explain historical variation in the social organization of inequality. Two issues are especially salient here: first, the historical variation in the articulation of class and status, and second, the broad historical problem in understanding the rationalization of social processes.

Class is part of a broader multidimensional schema of stratification in Weber in which the most central contrast is between “class” and “status”. Status groups are defined within the sphere of communal interaction (or what Weber calls the “social order”) and always imply some level of identity in the sense of some recognized “positive or negative social estimation of honor” (Weber [1924] 1978:932). A status group cannot exist without its members being in some way conscious of being members of the group: “In contrast to classes, Stände (status groups) are normally groups” (Weber [1924] 1978:932).

This conceptual contrast between class and status for Weber is not primarily a question of the motives of actors: It is not that status groups are derived from purely symbolic motives and class categories are derived from material interests. Although people care about status categories in part because of their importance for symbolic ideal interests, class positions also entail such symbolic interests, and both status and class are implicated in the pursuit of material interests. As Weber ([1924] 1978: 935) writes, “material monopolies provide the most effective motives for the exclusiveness of a status group” (p. 935). Rather than motives, the central contrast between class and status is the nature of the mechanisms through which class and status shape inequalities of the material and symbolic conditions people’s lives. Class affects material well-being directly through the kinds of economic assets people bring to market exchanges. Status affects material well-being indirectly, through the ways that categories of social honor underwrite various coercive mechanisms that, in Weber’s ([1924] 1978: 935) words, “go hand in hand with the monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities”.

The contrast between class and status provide one of the axes of Weber’s analysis of historical variation in systems of inequality. Weber ([1924] 1978: 938) writes:

When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable, stratification by status is favoured. Every technological repercussion and economic transformation threatens stratification by status and pushes the class situation into the foreground. Epochs and countries in which the naked class situation is of predominant significance are regularly the periods of technical and economic transformations.

One of the central reasons why capitalist societies are societies within which class becomes the predominant basis of stratification is precisely because capitalism fosters continual “technical and economic transformation.”

Weber’s concept of class is also closely linked to his theoretical preoccupation with the problem of historical variation in the process of rationalization of social life. Following Levine’s (1985: 210) decomposition of Weber’s complex conceptual inventory of forms of rationalization, the problem of class for Weber is primarily situated within one particular form of rationalization: the objective instrumental rationalization of social order. In all societies the ways people gain access to and use material resources is governed by rules that are objectively embodied in the institutional settings within which they live. When the rules allocate resources to people on the basis of ascriptive characteristics, and when the use of those material resources is governed by tradition rather than the result of a calculative weighing of alternatives, then economic interactions take place under nonrationalized conditions. When those rules enable people to make precise calculations about alternative uses of those resources and discipline people to use those resources in more rather than less efficient ways on the basis of those calculations, then those rules can be described as “rationalized.” This occurs, in Weber’s analysis, when market relations have the most pervasive influence on economic interactions (i.e., in fully developed capitalism). His definition of classes in terms of the economic opportunities people face in the market, then, is simultaneously a definition of classes in terms of rationalized economic interactions. Class, in these terms, assumes its central sociological meaning to Weber as a description of the way people are related to the material conditions of life under conditions in which their economic interactions are regulated in a maximally rationalized manner. Weber is, fundamentally, less interested in the problem of the material deprivations and advantages of different categories of people as such, or in the collective struggles that might spring from those advantages and disadvantages, than he is in the underlying normative order and cognitive practices – instrumental rationality – that are embodied in the social interactions that generates these life chances. “Class,” in these terms, is part of the answer to a broad question about historical variations in the degree and forms of rationalization of social life in general, and the social organization of inequality in particular.