Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

Based on a historical and sociological approach, this course provides an introduction to the analysis of inequalities by focusing on the social justification of privileges and social boundaries.

Economic and social inequalities are a structuring dimension of societies and are at the center of many analyses in history, economics and sociology. This course offers an in-depth analysis of how inequalities in access to economic resources, political power, and knowledge are justified in different societies by articulating barriers of class, gender, or race. Drawing on works on different historical configurations in Europe but also in America, Africa and Asia, the course encourages an epistemological reflection on the production of social barriers and the social construction of « elites ». Against an approach that naturalizes the concept of « elite », this course will put forward the idea that the very notion of elite is the product of a work of delimitation, of construction of social borders whose analysis can be made by mobilizing the classical tools of social sciences.

The course intends to highlight the fact that there is no natural superiority of an "elite" but rather variable justifications of unequal access to power and economic resources. If inequalities are produced by structural economic logics, the course will pay attention to the fact that the activation of social boundaries always supposes an active work of universalization of their own values. These forms of justification of privilege over time vary in their lexicon but often include elements that are stable from one historical configuration to another, whether it is the way in which the European aristocracy closed the door to the rising bourgeoisie within court societies or the way in which British elites in the nineteenth century, for example, justified their closure to women or to colonized peoples through the building of an elite masculinity (in class, we will refer for instance to the book
Oxbridge Men
by Paul R. Deslandes). The course invites to focus on the manufacture of social boundaries, on the way in which privileges find forms of justification, including in societies that claim to put merit or talent first, as opposed to inheritance or dynastic tradition. The course will also give space to the moments when these social boundaries are criticized, fought and challenged to the point of forcing actors in positions of power to update the justification of their privileges or to le