Why are static classes considered “classes” and “reference types”?

Question

I’ve been pondering about the C# and CIL type system today and I’ve started to wonder why static classes are considered classes. There are many ways in which they are not really

Answer 1

Good point, it's probably because of historic reasons, i.e. they didn't want to invent something new as static classes already existed.

C++, Pascal (Delphi) and Java all have static classes, and those are what C# is based on.