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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Marilyn Silverman, An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) |
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THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of the Irish working class, as Marilyn Silverman points out in the introduction to this fascinating book, in general remains narrowly focused on formal labour and radical organizations, biographies, and on particular moments and events that impact on political history. Silverman, an anthropologist at York University, rightly believes that the voices of ordinary workers in Ireland are rarely heard and that the histories or "trajectories" of working-class awareness, experience, and consciousness have not been adequately explored. |
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Silverman seeks to probe these topics by using a localized study "to build general interpretations of both the past and the present," (9) and she is at pains to stress that while her book is a locality history, it is primarily concerned with political-economic processes that have general and theoretical implications. In other words, detailed local research is important in terms of constructing a coherent macro-historical view. The locality chosen is Thomastown, County Kilkenny, a town in Southeastern Ireland with 1,300 residents with a further 1,400 in its immediate hinterland. Silverman has already written extensively about the area and has carried on anthropological field-work there since 1980. The analysis in the book is informed by Gramscian concepts of hegemony, anthropological approaches to local history, and ideas of class awareness and experience as elaborated by some social historians, such as William H. Sewell and Keith McClelland. In that sense, the book is inter-disciplinary. Her methodological approach, as she admits herself, is eclectic and she meshes the "thick description" favoured by anthropologists with practises employed by historians such as analyses of interviews, newspapers, parliamentary reports, and a wide range of archival material. |
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The result is an intricately constructed picture of workers and the working class in a small Irish town between 1800 and 1950 containing many insights into political life and its interaction with material conditions. Silverman sees hegemony as essential to apprehending society and to understand hegemony one must understand political economy. Her approach to political economy, in turn, privileges analytical categories of class and class identities, locating these inside "the structures of domination perpetrated by the state, capitalism and colonialism." (502–3) According to this book, class awareness was central to life in Thomastown but was often felt in terms of what she describes as a "status-class hierarchy" in which "shopkeepers" were better than "labourers" and so on. In short, she argues that class differentiation was complex and apparently competing models could co-exist. At all times the labourers or unskilled workers were left in no doubt regarding their lowly status and Silverman is very good at illuminating the resentments bred by discrimination and social oppression; for instance, she recounts how a widespread and bitterly held perception existed among labourers in the 1980s that "no working man ever got an IRA pension" for service during the war of independence. (278–9) This was blamed on the machinations of farmers and shopkeepers. In general, the image shaped by Silverman is a convincing one but there is at least one significant omission. The local impact of emigration receives no sustained treatment even though it is admitted, almost in passing, that the effect of the massive emigration after 1845 "on living standards, on class formation and boundaries, and on common sense was profound." (62) Emigration was an important factor of Irish life right up to the 1980s and the impact on those left behind was substantial and enduring. |
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The influence of postmodernism, and its hostility to "grand narratives," is discernable to a degree in the book, perhaps even in the rather curious absence of the definite article from the title. The "Irish working class" identified in the book's title is in fact that of Thomastown and the implication would appear to be that discrete working classes are found within localities, though elsewhere Silverman seems opposed to such a reading. Such an idea would be novel to Irish labour history, which in its aversion to theoretical models drawn from sociology has managed, whether for better or worse, to evade the embrace of postmodernist thinking and the unitary working class as a concept remains intact. This regrettable suspicion of theory among Irish labour historians is unlikely to be dispelled by Silverman's critique of the concepts of "collective action" and "labour movement," which she dismisses because "these notions assume an evolutionary trajectory and impute a homogeneous coherence to the political actions of workers." (503) This dismissal, which occurs on the final page, jars somewhat when one considers how often both (as realities) pop up in the preceding text. Moreover, how these concepts embody evolutionist notions of socio-political history is unclear and not properly explained. The author's assertion a few lines on that the "so-called collective is complex and the so-called movement is heterogeneous" is something of a commonplace and would seem to increase rather than diminish the import of collective activity and social movements. Also, Silverman's contentious conclusion that "political-economic processes have no outcomes, only ongoing trajectories that can be observed and analytically constructed for particular periods of time" (504) will draw hostile fire from some historians. |
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Nonetheless, this handsomely produced book is an important and welcome addition to the historiography of the Irish working class, and should encourage further localized research on issues of consciousness, ideology, experience, and political economy. A macrohistory of Irish workers cannot be written without such layered microhistories and Marilynn Silverman deserves praise for indicating new and productive ways in which to explore our past. All those interested in Irish working-class history should read this book. |
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Fintan Lane
National University of Ireland, Cork
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