Rather than using a ranking system based on occupational prestige to explain social stratification through class, Burrage attempts to show how class formation can be explained through political events and decisions. Using detailed analysis of four countries, the book attempts to answer several 'mysteries' of the English class system: why did an English "intelligentsia "fail to emerge? Why was the working class reluctant to engage in violent class struggle? Why did public ownership increase class consciousness, and why could class sentiment be combined with comparatively high rates of mobility? In this distinctive and important contribution, Burrage identifies the main features of England's emerging 'classless society' - one that is centralized, intensively managed, and no longer resting on internalized social controls.

The revolutions of France, the United States, and England each inspired dreams of creating legal institutions that did not depend on specialist intermediaries, and, in different ways, provoked attacks on the existing rules and government of the legal profession more widespread and severe than at any other time in their history. These dreams came to naught and, sooner or later, the professions recovered, but their revolutionary experiences nevertheless had a lasting impact on their subsequent organization, and help to explain why three previously convergent professions should diverge as their societies industrialised. The social upheaval of industrialization may also help to explain many of their peculiarities down to the present day: why, for instance, French advocates imposed such strict ethical obligations on themselves, from which they were only released by the state in 1992, why American lawyers should be the first to be at ease in the market, but faced intractable problems of professional self-government, why two professions should emerge in England, both with a high degree of self-government, and both long indifferent to law schools and to the market for legal services. Since lawyers were the first occupation to organize as a profession, this insightful comparative inquiry then asks what their experience might tell us about other organized occupations in these three societies, and the difference between their educational institutions, their division of labour, their civil societies and lesser forms of government, and about the ways they have been stratified and formed classes.

Distinguished by their sharp insights, eloquence, even humor, the writings of Martin Trow on the development of higher education have helped define the field. Collected here are his most influential essays, tracing the arc and evolution of his prolific scholarly career over more than four decades.

Trow is well known for his pioneering work on the transition from elite to mass to universal higher education, and scholars worldwide continue to use his conceptual framework for analyzing and comparing institutions.

As both a sociologist and a public policy analyst, Trow hoped his analyses of higher education would help influence public policy. He believed that understanding how higher education had developed--its peculiarities in a particular society and the direction of change within it--would lead to wiser policy choices.

Martin Trow began compiling this collection before his death in 2007. Editor Michael Burrage, along with Trow's friends and colleagues, worked to carry out Trow's wishes, writing introductions to the essays which situate them in their context and which continue each contributor's conversations with Trow during his lifetime.

Those seriously interested in the emergence of mass higher education, and the debates surrounding it, will appreciate finding many of Trow's groundbreaking works--including three articles never before published--in a single volume.

Rather than a ranking system based on occupational prestige, this book explains social stratification through political events and decisions. Using analyses of Russia, France, the United States and England, Burrage claims that class stems from the habitual relationship between state and civil society and, remarkably, is undermined by free markets.