Chapter 1
The Threatofthe Proletariat and the Discourse
of the Masses
Icall himaproletarian whose parents neglected him, did not bathe him, did not groom
him, and neitherraised him to beagood person nor encouraged him to attend church
and school.He never masters his trade, marries without money andraises his brood in
his image,readytodamage the property of other people and beacancer soreonthe com-
munity.Furthermore,Icall proletarians the drunks and lechers whodonot fit into the so-
cial order and keep BlueMondaymoresacred thanSunday.Friedrich HarkortIn the midnineteenth century,the specter of the workingclass gave rise to new
academic disciplines deeplyconcernedwith crowd behavior and mass action.
The emerging massdiscourse in psychologyand sociologyrelied heavilyon
emotional categoriesto describe the social and psychological processesof
mass formation and, consciouslyorunconsciously, to define therelationship
of the bourgeois elites to the modern masses–which invariablymeant the work-
ing classes.Taking advantageofthe resulting surfeit of projections and displace-
ments, the first chapter consequentlyintroduces the subjectofthis study not
throughaMarxist definition of the proletariat,but from the outside, that is,
the nineteenth-century writingsthat introduced massdiscourse in the social sci-
ences and established the antagonistic terms thatrevealedits historical origins
in class discourse.
In the quotation above, therailroad magnateand liberal politicianFriedrich
Harkort (1793–1880),akey figure in the earlyindustrialization of theRuhr re-
gion, defines proletarians first and foremost through theirshared condition of
lack: of resources, skills, morals, and so forth.¹Where othersmight have re-
sponded with compassion and joined the fight for social justice, Harkort’spalpa-
ble sense of disgust expresses his belief in the natural order of inequality,but it
also reveals his fear of the wrath of the oppressed.About halfacentury later,
Friedrich Harkort,quoted in Isolde Dietrich,“Überlegungenzur Rolle der Literatur in der Leb-
ensweise großstädtischer Industriearbeiter in Deutschlandum1900,”inLiteratur und proletari-
sche Kultur. Beiträgezur Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterklasse im 19.Jahrhundert,ed. Die-
trich Mühlbergand Rainer Rosenberg (Berlin: Akademie, 1983), 297–298. All translations aremy
own unless notedotherwise.