Abstract: Examines the development of political cleavages over twenty or so years in the Federal German Republic. It combines a class analysis with considerations of several competing perspectives on the character of the social bases of politics, particularly those concerning the rise of the ‘new politics’ agenda and its relation to differing class interests. It finds ‘a quite astonishing constancy of the differences in party orientation among the antagonists of the classical class cleavage’. Moreover, the ‘new politics’ does appear to have a clear class basis—and one that is plausibly derived from interests linked to position in the class structure.