Rancière’spolemical intervention was directed against the dreams of classstrug-
gle that prompted leftist intellectuals duringthe 1960s to“rediscover”the prole-
tariat–guidedbythe assumption that the workers’liveswere, and still are, re-
ducible to the problem of wagelabor and the promise of revolution. His
conclusion that“What he [i.e., the worker] lacks and needs isaknowledge of
self that revealsto himabeing dedicated to something else besides exploita-
tion”²⁶redirects attentiontothe legacies of humanism as an emancipatory proj-
ect andrecognizesthe importance of bourgeois notions of subjectivity for the
workers’movement.However,the historicaland theoretical relevance of what
Rancière calls the workers’dream cannot be reducedtothe recognition, across
the classdivide, ofashared humanityassertedagainst the regimes of wagelabor
and expressedinamateur poems about love,nature, and beauty.Covering a
much later and much longer time period,TheProletarian Dreampresents a
closelyrelated but ultimatelyvery different story:that German workers also
did not write manyplays about the factory and thetenement; thatthe conditions
of labor and labor struggles playedasurprisingly small part even in theirauto-
biographical writing; but thatpoems about nature and lovecoexisted with
poems about revolution and class struggle;and that their novels treated the
male camaraderie ofradicalizedworkers as more important thanmarriageand
familylife. Rancière is right that onlyrecognitionofthe radical otherness of
the proletarian dream–that is, its incommensurability with working-classreal-
ity and Marxist theory–can produceadeeper understandingofthe nineteenth-
century cultureofclass and socialism. However,for the Germancase, thatrad-
ical othernessincludes the belief in social utopias and theyearning for collective
imaginaries that not onlygoalong wayexplaining the emotional cultureofthe
workers’movement but alsoshednew light on the functioning of cultural prac-
tices as emotional practices in social movementsmoregenerally.
Recognition of the seemingly unbridgeable divide that separates the contem-
porary conjuncture from the proletarian dreammust includethe acknowledg-
ment of exclusion, discrimination, and persecution as an integral part of work-
ing-class culture and the difficult conditions of its emergence. Covering about
seventyyears of German history,TheProletarian Dreamdevelops this argument
through the contributions ofalarge group ofradicalized workers and socialist
activists both famous and unknown.Although the focus will be on collective
imaginaries, it cannot remain unmentioned that the proletarian dream was in-
vented, revised, disseminated, promoted, and defended with considerable
coststo individual lives. Acrossgenerations, most of these activists mentioned
Rancière, Proletarian Nights,20.
Introduction 27