Labour movements deployed well-known strategies for collective action, but how did the professional class collectivise their interests? The mechanisms by which the professionals achieved and maintained their status in the mid-twentieth century are laid bare by records of an institution unique to Australasia: formal conciliation and arbitration courts. This chapter focuses on a particular event, the Professional Engineers Case, which was brought before the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission between 1957 and 1961. This case shows professionals articulating their class status to argue, in arbitration, for the value of their work to the nation’s collective economic and moral good. This good was linked, for the judges who elevated their salaries, to the individual professional’s investment in education but also to the prospective worth of their virtuous work to the nation. The risk to the nation if unvirtuous people performed professional work was too high to let them fall behind in material terms. To belong to the professional class, it was not enough to be qualified – they also had to perform class in their standard of living. Assuring consumption standards, then, was also a way to assure quality work – and the rationale that enabled the professional class to monetize their virtue.

In the Epilogue, I consider the ways that the rise and fall of the professional class has left the world in thrall to a conflict between managerial capitalism and professional technocracy. Unlike labour versus capital, this intra-bourgeois conflict is not productive of change. Rather, self-perpetuating cycles seeking material and moral authority have infected workplaces and global politics, impeding reform. Much is at stake, including climate change. Professionals, whose work remains necessary to a good society, need to separate virtue from capitalism, disaggregating their moral goals from their own class interests – even to the point of turning the hierarchy that they made on its head. The Epilogue draws inspiration from the reversals of hierarchies made possible by acts of decolonization.

This final chapter probes the extent to which tensions between communal and revolutionary perceptions of the past can help explain the continued potency of political labels two decades into the People’s Republic. The chapter pursues these tensions for what they say about the relationship between epistemic and physical violence in Maoist ideology and practice. One of the main cultural aspects of the late sixties Cultural Revolution was the question of reproduction into the future for certain cultural forms – and oblivion for others. The chapter then turns to the human side of this destruction. The sixties saw an expansion of class through a stress on personal or family background that brought historical understanding to the fore of class struggle, a basis on which eliminationist and collective killings were conducted along bygone class lines. Finally, it considers the sixties in China in the broader context of state and civilian violence in the twentieth-century world and its roots in the civilizing mission of the colonial project.

The fourth chapter reconstructs the population history of the Nahua community in Xochimilco for the entirety of the colonial period. Having established the timing, rate, and extent of demographic change, the chapter traces the implications of population decline for social relations. The chapter argues that epidemics and subsequent interventions by the government in the tribute system, incomplete and unsuccessful though they were, represented an assertion of royal authority, one that provided opportunities for Nahua nobles and commoners to contest and renegotiate their relationships with each other and with the colonial administration. These changes proved to be especially threatening to the nobility. In response, the dynastic rulers sought to reassert their own political power within the altepetl, although their success owed much to the efforts of noblewomen in securing and harnessing economic assets to their families’ advantage. They also contracted valuable strategic marriage alliances that bolstered, if only temporarily, their families’ positions in the face of so much loss of life.

This chapter argues that US urban labor literature depicts cities as sites of geographic, social, and political contestation. The chapter focuses on three historical periods: the early twentieth century, when the immigration surge from southern and eastern Europe transformed the several US cities, especially New York; second, the long 1930s, when economic collapse, internal migration, and the new union power recast labor’s possibilities; and third, the post-1970s era, when globalization, deindustrialization, and immigration from Latin America and Asia dismantled the industrial working class and created new terms on which to imagine labor’s claim to the nation’s increasingly transnational cities. Cutting across the antinomy of division and solidarity labor literatures of the city –– realist, modernist, and in more speculative modes –– depict the deeply contradictory nature of urban space for working people, who are the source of so much of the city’s social and economic wealth, yet can win their share of it only through collective struggle. Texts include Ridge, “The Ghetto”; Wright, Native Son; LeSueur, The Girl; Russell Banks, Continental Drift; and Riker’s film The City/La Cuidad.

Political sociology has an important role in explaining the history, development, and consequences of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, our methods and theory are equipped to address the role of states and the political economy in shaping processes and outcomes of globalization, but also to examine specific forms of collective action aimed at building neoliberal institutions – or challenging and transforming them. This chapter addresses the ways that the collective action of US corporate leaders ushered in neoliberalization through trade policy, closely interacting with state officials and institutions.