In Defense of Class Wars in Population Health: The New Landscape of Social Class With Bourdieu, Neo-Marxists, and the Kohn/Schooler/Wright Integrative Models

The field of social inequalities in health has been dominated by an individual attributes approach with a small number of indicators, namely occupation, income, and education. We review the weakness of this approach and detail the emergence of sociological alternatives tied to the writings of Bourdieu, Marx, and Weber. A particularly rich theoretical development stems from the integration of Weberian and Marxian approaches, associated with sociologists Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and Erik Olin Wright.