Class has lost its status as a master concept explaining identity.

Evidence

Now, as I have said, the question of how to begin to think questions of identity, either social or individual, not in the wake of their disappearance but in the wake of their erosion, of their fading, of their not having the kind of purchase and comprehensive explanatory power they had before, that is what it seems to me has gone. They used to be thought of—and it is a wonderfully gendered definition—as “master concepts,” the “master concepts” of class. … It is not tolerable any longer to have a “master concept” like that. Once it loses its “master” status, its explanatory reach weakens, becomes more problematic. We can think of some things in relation to questions of class, though always recognizing its real historical complexity. Yet there are certain other things it simply will not, or cannot, decipher or explain. And this brings us face to face with the increasing social diversity and plurality, the technologies of the self which characterize the modern world in which we live. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 197

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘master concepts’ of class losing explanatory power connects directly to the Islamophobia field’s need to theorize identity beyond class reductionism, and to Hall’s own foundational critique of economism in cultural studies.
• DEFINE: ‘Master concept’ is named and defined through loss: a concept whose explanatory reach was total but now weakens.