The momentous shift from classasastructureto class asarelationship
turned working-classculture intoaprivileged sitefor studying the practices
and processes that produced class identifications. In an equallyinfluential
1958 studyonculture and society,RaymondWilliams offered an expandeddef-
inition of culturethat,given its etymologicalroots (e.g., in agricultural cultiva-
tion), aims to encompass“awhole wayoflife, material, intellectual and spiritu-
al,”and extend from institutions and artifactsto rituals, values, and beliefs.⁸
Unlikebourgeois culture with its emphasis on theautonomous individual, work-
ing-class culture for him was founded on, and sustainedby, community and sol-
idarity as coreorganizing principles and consequentlyfound privileged expres-
sion in specific structures of feeling.His belief in the formative power of culture
allowedWilliams furthermoreto conceive of class asalearning process thatin-
cluded political victoriesand defeats and that continuouslyreaffirmed its origi-
nal commitments through what he called the moraleconomy, the kind of values
and virtues examined in this book through terms such as emotional regimes and
emotional practices.His laterreflections on keywords like class, culture, hegem-
ony, andrevolution allowedWilliamsto develop further hisapproachto cultural
materialism against the structuralism of Louis Althusser and others andto lay
the foundationfor what would eventuallybecome (British) cultural studies.
The groundbreaking work by Hobsbawm, Thompson, andWilliams and the
social and culturaltransformations associatedwith the New Left has hadapow-
erful effect on British and American historians specializing in modern Germany.
RichardJ. Evans,who has contributed several studies on the German working
class and the women’smovement,and Geoff Eley,who has written about the
making of Germandemocracy and the transnational history of the European
left,haveeach used categories of class to revisit coreassumptions about the par-
allel processes of democratization and modernization.ForEvans,this has meant
moving beyond the almosthabitual equation of working class with workers’
movement and towardagreater emphasis on the role of mass cultureand leisure
practices in the articulation of oppositional views and alternative forms of pro-
test.For Eley,this has involved affirming the role of the workers’movement in
the difficult German path towarddemocracy and of the New Left in developing
new forms of solidarity in dialogue with new social movements.⁹His insistence
RaymondWilliams,Culture&Society:1780– 1950 (NewYork: Columbia University Press,
1958),xvi.Also see hisMarxism and Literature(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1977).
Forreferences, see RichardJ.Evans,TheGermanWorking Class 1888–1933:ThePolitics of Ev-
eryday Life(Totowa, NJ:Barnes&Noble, 1982) andProletarians and Politics:Socialism, Protest
and theWorking Class in Germany beforethe FirstWorldWar(NewYork: HarvesterWheatsheaf,
1990), as wellasGeoff Eley,Forging Democracy:The Historyofthe Left in Europe, 1850– 2000
AHisto riography of the Proletarian Dream 343