gardes to its continuingdiminishment in the anti-aesthetic of much cultural
theory today.
Culture–defined,inthe narrow sense,assymbolic practices and their inter-
pretations and, in the wider sense, as what RaymondWilliams callsawhole way
of life–has been integraltothe proletarian dream from its utopian beginnings
to itsdystopian endings.Forthat reason, it should not come asasurprise that
scholars and intellectualsduring the 1960sand 1970sfirst turned to working-
class culture asamodel for new alternative or oppositional public spheres.In
the same waythat socialistssince the nineteenth century have soughttoextend
theKantian notion of the aesthetic as disinterested pleasure towardthe instruc-
tional functions that had always been part of folk culture,anew generation of
scholars and activists from the 1960s and 1970sreturned to the idealistphiloso-
phers and their Marxist interpreters to unite aesthetics and politics in the name
of ademocratic and progressive mass cultureand apolitically engagedart.Dur-
ing theWilhelmine andWeimaryears, and again duringthe heydays of Critical
Theory and the New Left,the attendant processes of rereading were sustained by
arguments that, in the traditions of Enlightenment thought,idealist aesthetics,
andWeimar classicism, accorded heightened significancetoculture asasystem
of meaning-making and tradition-building,thatemphasized the emancipatory
function of literature and the arts, and that invested the aesthetic with utopian
qualities and critical faculties.
The proletarian dream emergedfrom the humanism and universalism of the
Enlightenment and the Marxist analysis of capitalism and class society.Asthe
main protagonist in the symbolic politics that came to distinguish working-
class culture, the proletariat assumed its discursive functionbothasthe self-ap-
pointed heir of bourgeois culture(Kultur)and as the defenderofearlier traditions
of folk (Volk)and community (Gemeinschaft). On the one hand, the indebtedness
of the proletarian dream to nineteenth-century discourses of community con-
firms the culturallymediated natureofemotions and the utopian function of
the aesthetic as established duringthe Enlightenment.Onthe other hand, the
socialist appropriation of the bourgeois heritageinitiates an opening of the aes-
thetic (in the conventional sense) towarddidactic and agitational modes that
continues in twentieth-century forms of mass mobilization. Like the nation-
states of the nineteenth century, the workers’movement depended on the inven-
tion ofatradition, to use Eric Hobsbawm’soften cited phrase, in forging prole-
tarian identificationsand strengtheningsocialist commitments.And like the im-
agined communities studied byBenedict Anderson, the workers’ movement
relied on narratives, myths, and symbols in defining its internal structuresand
external boundaries. Of course, this includes the invention ofapast and future
for what this studycalls imagined (and imagining) communities,two variations
16 Introduction