Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith

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Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith | Class and Early America: An Introduction | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Class and Early America: An Introduction

CLASS," Raymond Williams once observed, "is an obviously difficult word, both in its range of meanings and in its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes a social division." In part this range and complexity of meaning reflects the long and convoluted history of the term. Derived from the Latin classis, class in ancient Rome referred to divisions instituted to separate citizens according to property and into military regiments. Early Christianity played a part in the complication of class by tracing social divisions, deemed inevitable in a divinely ordained and hierarchical world, to Adam and Eve and the Fall. This view informed the stratification of European society into nobility, clergy, and commons, which characterized social description from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Proclaiming the equality of man before God, Christian doctrine also figured in the development of laws and expectations intended to maintain social harmony in an inegalitarian and conflictual world. By the mid-seventeenth century, this combination of classical, Christian, and medieval influences had generated a powerful set of assumptions and discourses that justified and explained hierarchical social divisions even as, for some, they also appeared to offer the possibility of more egalitarian human relations. In this period the word class—meaning an order or distribution of people according to their several degrees—first entered English usage.¹	1
During the next two centuries, class gradually eclipsed estate and degree as the preferred term of social classification for different sorts of people who were distinguished by increasingly unstable considerations of status, manners, and wealth.² For some the emerging preference for class as a term of social description indicated a critical shift in economic relations that led to the development of capitalism: a shift from economies centered on agriculture, local markets, and exchange relations mediated by long-established private and public obligations to ones characterized by commercialized agriculture and manufacturing, global markets, and exchange relations determined by little more than ambition and the cash nexus. Witnessing this transformation and drawing on a century or more of social and economic commentary, Karl Marx formulated his view of class as derived from the productive relations men and women have to enter into to survive. He also posited an important distinction between class as an objective condition and class as a generative historical force with the potential to transform society. The first attribute reflected an individual's relationship to the means of production. The second developed only when members of a given class realized the political and historical implications of their structurally determined subject position. In so doing Marx deployed class as not only a term of social description but also an analytic category that, he argued, could explain the history of all hitherto existing societies and even provide a guide for the future.	2
In more recent times the complexity of class has been compounded by the term's frequent use across many disciplines—sociology, politics, literary criticism, and history—all of which adjust its meaning for their own purposes. Since the 1960s, however, one view of class has predominated in early modern Anglo-American historiography. This view was devised by a gifted generation of English Marxist literary critics and historians who valorized local intellectual idioms and popular traditions of social criticism and resistance. Celebrating the aesthetic qualities and historical significance of the experiences and attitudes of ordinary working-class men and women, these early champions of English (later Cultural) Studies challenged the idea of a unitary high culture. In this intellectual milieu, E. P. Thompson developed his influential critique of the economic determinism of contemporary Marxist theory and its concern for the behavior of systems and laws in the social relations of production. Thompson advocated reconsidering the mode of production as "a kernel of human relationship from which all else grows." In 1963 the publication of The Making of the English Working Class set out Thompson's agenda and inspired a generation of scholars to look for class—and, in time, other forms of identity—in the self-consciousness and sense of shared problems and objectives that arose from the lived experience of ordinary historical subjects.³	. . .

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