modernity,modernism, and the historicalavant-gardes. Despiteinternational
(ist) connections and commitments, the culture of the workers’movement before
World WarIremained under the influenceoflocal perspectivesinits cultural
practices and of national traditions in its aesthetic theories. Despite the close
connections betweenAustrian and GermanSocial Democracy,and despite the
Jewishcontributionto Marxist theory and the history of theKPD, Prussianism
and Protestantism remained important influences on the emotional regimes de-
velopedinthe name of proletarian culture.Forthese reasons,the secondvolume
on the workers’states will payspecial attention to the constellations of nation-
alism and socialism conjured in the name of the workingclass and the subter-
ranean currents of antisemitism that continued to resonateinlatercritiques of
liberalism and modernism.
Fourth and last point:Taking seriously the emancipatory and prefigurative
functionsofthe proletarian dream and consideringits compensatory and disci-
plining effects makes it possible, finally,through the introduction of emotion as
bothamajor theme andaheuristic device, to leave behind the unproductive bi-
naries that have constrained academicstudies on working-class culture and the
cultureofsocialism and communism. Unlikeprevious approaches that treat so-
cialist art and literature asareflection of social reality or evaluate the texts’for-
mal and thematic choices against the criteria of Marxist theory or bourgeois high
culture,TheProletarian Dreamhas approached these proliferating,heterogene-
ous, and often undistinguished texts as foundingsites for the convergence of po-
litical emotion and aesthetic emotion, as laboratories of imagined emotional
communities,and as incubators for class-based emotional regimes.Departing
from the diagnosis of the modern masses as the embodiment of dangerous irra-
tionality,the most importantmodels of proletarian mobilizationhavebeen intro-
duced through their respective emotional cultures, including the emotional so-
cialism of the nineteenth century and the cold stream of Marxism of the early
twentieth century. Thereconstruction of these emotional archiveshas not been
limited to literarygenres,art forms, performance practices, and visual styles–
that is, definitionsofculture in the narrow sense.Attentive to Williams’sdefini-
tion of cultureasawhole wayoflife, the proletarian dream has also been ana-
lyzed through the select socialist and communist appropriation of concepts from
modernpsychologyand sociology, the refunctionalization of bourgeois notions
of selfhood, subjectivity,and interiority;and the gradual openingtoward mass
culturalforms of celebrity cultureand multimediality.The introduction of emo-
tions into the historicalconstellations of classand culture has brought into
sharprelief thegenerative and transformative power of political emotions in de-
fining theterms of individuality, sociability,and community.The resultant focus
on political emotions and the politics of emotion has moved the debate beyond
338 Afterword