recent essay on ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’, Thompson advances a set of new propositions. He now concedes that ‘class, as it eventuated within 19th century industrial capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic category of class, has in fact no claim to universality. Class in that sense is no more than a special case of the historical formations which arise out of class struggle.’62 For in the 19th century, ‘class in its modern usage became available to the cognitive system of the people then living at the time … Hence the concept not only enables us to organize and analyze the evidence; it is also, in a new sense, present in the evidence itself. We can observe, in industrial Britain or France or Germany, class institutions, class parties, class cultures’.63 Prior to the 19th century, however, historians are still obliged to use the concept of class, not because of its perfection as a notion, but because ‘no alternative category is available to analyze a manifest and universal historical process’—namely ‘class struggle’.64 These arguments lead to the concise conclusion: ‘Class struggle is the prior, as well as the more universal, concept’—for ‘people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process’.65 Hence the paradox that across England in the 18th century lay a ‘societal field of force’ of class struggle between ‘the crowd at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other’,66 yet without the former truly constituting a class.
Does this comprehensive redefinition solve the difficulties of Thompson’s view of class? At first sight, it appears a major step beyond the formulations of The Making of the English Working Class. On closer inspection, however, the same theoretical inspiration can be seen, and with it some of the same logical and empirical problems recur. What Thompson has in effect done is to retain the equation: class = class consciousness, but to postulate behind it—at once conceptually and historically—an anterior stage of class struggle, when groups conflict without achieving that collective self-awareness that defines class itself. But why in that case use the term ‘class’ for such ‘struggle’ at all? The answer appears to be an essentially pragmatic one—no better word has so far turned up. A liberal historian would no doubt retort that ‘social conflict’ is therefore preferable, precisely because it begs no questions. It is not easy to see what reply Thompson could make, for the whole thrust of his argument is still to detach class from its objective anchorage in determinate relations of production, and identify it with subjective consciousness or culture. Once this is done, the absence of a class ‘culture’ automatically puts in question the very existence of class itself—as in 18th century England. In perverse logic, it is then possible to suggest that there was ‘class struggle without class’—in the title of the essay. To which there are two straightforward answers. Firstly, the ruling class— the ‘aristocracy and gentry’ as he here rightly designates it—was certainly possessed of the necessary sense of identity and combativity to constitute a class, even on Thompson’s own criteria, which would leave us with the curiosity of ‘class struggle with a single class’—a koan of one hand clapping. Secondly, absence of class consciousness in the 19th century sense in no way means that the plebs of the 18th century was therefore an a-class phenomenon. It was not, of course, a homogeneous social bloc, but a changeable coalition composed of different categories of urban or rural wage-earners, small producers, petty traders, and unemployed, whose frontiers would vary according to the successive conjunctures that crystallized it—very much as Thompson so ably describes. Each of these categories, however, can be rationally ordered in a materialist class analysis, by their respective structural positions within the several modes of production of Hanoverian society. To disaggregate the social or political affrays of the time into their component class units, in other words, is not to do violence to their intelligibility but to help to elucidate it. No economism need be implied in such a procedure, which does not render study of the process of congregation that formed 18th century crowds (dissident-radical or clerical-monarchist, spontaneous or manipulated, as the case might be) unnecessary, but rather more precise and pointed. Thompson’s dictum that ‘we know about class because people have repeatedly behaved in class ways’67 disallows its presence where behaviour appears so coalescent and contradictory as to be ‘unclasslike’. Whether the accent is put on behaviour or consciousness68—struggling or valuing—such definitions of class remain fatally circular. It is better to say, with Marx, that social classes may not become conscious of themselves, may fail to act or behave in common, but they still remain-materially, historically—classes.
The third major claim contained in The Making of the English Working Class brings us back to the 19th century. The title of the book promises to trace a process with a finite end: the English working class, as such inexistent in the 1790s, is made by the mid-1830s, when its presence is the most significant factor in national politics, felt in ‘every county in England, and in most fields of life’.69 The term making here has an unmistakable force: it suggests that the character of the English working class was in its most essential traits formed by the time of the Reform Bill. What are the arguments Thompson adduces for this periodization? The first and most salient is that the English proletariat had achieved a new consciousness of its own unity by the 1830s. An identity of interest was felt by workers across the most diverse occupations, where before traditional divisions of trade or region had prevailed. First expressed in the growing ‘ethos of mutuality’ of local friendly societies, it emerged on a national scale with the General Unionism of 1830-1834. Politically, the course of the whole parliamentary crisis of 1831-1832 revealed the stamp of its initiative and independence. Thus it was a peculiarity of English development that ‘where we would expect to find a growing middle-class reform movement, with a working-class tail, only later succeeded by an independent agitation of the working class, in fact this process was reversed’.70 Thereafter, middle-class reformers succeeded in utilizing popular agitation to force from the landowning classes an enfranchisement that was carefully demarcated to exclude the masses who had rendered it possible. In these years, too, ‘something was lost’ in the failure of the tradition of working-class Radicalism to achieve a junction with the Romantic critique of utilitarianism that was contemporary with it. Yet it is the collective achievement of this time that is finally remarkable. ‘The working people should not be seen only as the lost myriads of eternity. They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture’.71
The grandeur of these concluding pages has been unanimously acknowledged. In a sense, it is their very power that forces on us their major problem. For as Tom Nairn wrote fifteen years ago, in what remains the most serious reflection on the book to date, one of the most central facts about the English working class is that ‘its development as a class is divided into two great phases, and there appears at first sight to be hardly any connection between them.’ For ‘the early history of the English working class is a history of revolt, covering more than half a century, from the period of the French Revolution to the climax of Chartism in the 1840s’.72 Yet ‘what became of this revolt? The great English working class, this titanic social force which seemed to be unchained by the rapid development of English capitalism in the first half of the century, did not finally emerge to dominate and remake English society. It could not break the mould and fashion another. Instead, after the 1840s it quickly turned into an apparently docile class. It embraced one species of moderate reformism after another, and has remained wedded to the narrowest and greyest of bourgeois ideologies in its principal movements’.73 Discounting the undoubted element of exaggeration in the final clause, which overstates the degree of later Fabian domination, the general truth of this description is hard to deny. Victor Kiernan has recently pronounced the same verdict: ‘with Chartism by 1850 virtually at an end, the failure of the new working class to enter and remould the national life left it shut up in the “labourism”, the self-absorption and political apathy, from which it has never
