form. By contrast, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl advancedauniquelyGerman view of
society as community that,basedonethnography(Volkskunde)asthe studyof
peoples and nations, incorporated the proletariat into older narrativesofbelong-
ing.Both lines of argumentationcontinued in the sociological studies byWerner
Sombart and Theodor Geiger that soughtto account for such elusive mass phe-
nomena as the urban crowdinthe context of earlytwentieth-century under-
standingsofcapitalismand modernity.
Der Sozialismus undCommunismus des heutigen Frankreich(1842, in English
asTheHistoryofthe Social MovementinFrance, 1789– 1850 )byLorenzvonStein
(1815–1890) is the first scholarlyaccount of the dangerous forces unleashedby
theFrench Revolution and theJuly Revolution thatintroduces the proletariat as
the herald ofadifferent social order.Aprofessor of political science,vonStein
was forcedto leave Germanyduringthe restoration period and taught at the Uni-
versityofVienna for almostthirtyyears. His book provedvery influential at the
time, not least through its focus on the emotional appeal of the socialistmove-
ment; scholars remain unsure about his influenceonMarx.Inthe book,von
Stein starts out by definingthe proletariat as“the entire classofthosewho
can claim neither education nor property as the basis of their standinginsociety
and who nonetheless feel called upon notto remainwithout all the properties
that constitutethe worth of the individual in the first place.”⁶Like Marx and En-
gels, he insists thatworkers and proletarians should not be used as synony-
mous, as onlythe latter possess criticalawareness of their situation. He also
shares theirdiagnosis of the withholding of recognitionasamajor sourceof
working-class discontent.
Notwithstanding occasional references to the triumph of capital over labor
in the ageofindustrialization that recall socialist treatises,von Stein’sbasic ap-
proach to the proletariat remains grounded inacombination of empirical obser-
vation and sociopsychological analysis and derivesits critical thrust from his ur-
gent demand for socialreform.Significantly, he identifies fluidityand ubiquity
as the most unsettling qualities of this new social class or formation, qualities
that for him revealthe limits of economic determinism and point to the impor-
tance of emotional factors in social(ist) identifications. There was widespread
disappointment after theFrench Revolution that the First Republic’scommit-
ment to equality hadremained an abstract idea and thatthe realities of inequal-
Lorenzvon Stein,Proletariat und Gesellschaft,ed. and intr.Manfred Hahn (Munich:Wilhelm
Fink, 1971), 11;the reprintisbased on the second edition ofDer Sozialismus undKommunismus
des heutigen Frankreichs.An abbreviatedEnglish translation of the three-volume work appeared
asTheHistoryofthe SocialMovement in France, 1789– 1850 ,trans.and intr.Kaethe Mengelberg
(Totowa, NJ:Bedminster,1964).
36 Chapter 1