oped through the critical engagementwith questions of working-class, proletar-
ian, socialist,and communist culture, with the inevitable conceptual slippages
treated as an integralpart of the findings.
British labor historians set the discussion into motion, beginning with Eric
Hobsbawm who decided to rewritewhat he called the long nineteenth century
from the perspective of laboringmen.⁵Focusing on the birthplace of earlycap-
italism and the industrial revolution, two other historians came to be identified
with influential critical traditions, E.P. Thompson as the representative of ahu-
manist Marxism and RaymondWilliams through his culturalist perspectiveson
class society and politics. Thompson andWilliams emphasized the importance
of romantic anticapitalism to the earlysocialist movements.Both alsoacknowl-
edgedthe crucial role of bourgeois mediators (teachers,publishers, agitators),
old and new forms of mediation(allegory,satire, caricature), and various places
of mediation (clubs,associations) in the emergence of working-classculture.
Thompson set the tone in his path-breaking 1963studyonthe making of the Brit-
ish workingclass when he famouslyannouncedhis intentionto rescue individ-
ual workers from“the enormous condescension of posterity.”⁶Rejecting the
availabletop-down histories, he approached class asahistorical phenomenon
based in humanrelationships and articulated“in therawmaterial of experience
and in consciousness.” Thompson’snotionoflived experience profoundly
changed the conceptualization of classand culture, moving itaway from the tra-
ditional base-superstructure model and towardamoredynamic understanding
of culture. This is how he defined the latter:“The class experience is largely de-
termined by the productive relations into which men are born–or enter invol-
untarily. Classconsciousness is the wayinwhich these experiences are handled
in culturalterms:embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional
forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not.”⁷
See EricHobsbawm,LabouringMen: Studies in the History of Labour(London:Weidenfeldand
Nicolson, 1965). Also see the tworecentvolumes from his monumentalhistoryofthe long nine-
teenth century,TheAge of Revolution: 1789– 1848 (NewYork: VintageBooks,1996) andTheAge
of Capital: 1848– 1875 (London:Weidenfeldand Nicolson,2010).
E. P. Thompson,TheMaking of the EnglishWorking Class(London:VictorGollancz, 1963), 12.
Foranexample of the extensive receptionofThompson in Germany, see MichaelVester,Die En-
tstehung des Proletariats als Lernprozess.Die Entstehung antikapitalistischerTheorie und Praxis in
England 1792– 1848 (Frankfurt am Main: EuropäischeVerlagsanstalt,1970) and HeikoGeiling,
Die moralische Ökonomie des frühen Proletariats.Die Entstehung der hannoverschen Arbeiterbe-
wegung aus den arbeitenden und armenVolksklassen bis 1875(Frankfurt am Main: Materialis,
1985).
Thompson,The Making of the EnglishWorking Class,9–10.
342 Afterword