An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950 (review)

In this book, Silverman attempts to point the way to a new political anthropology in which detailed local ethnographical study illuminates wider questions of class relations. She focuses on the town of Thomastown, Ireland, which she and Gulliver studied previously, and which appears to have been a typical town in a relatively prosperous part of Ireland. ¹ The strength of the book is its exploration of how "understandings" or common ideas developed in the working class, as mediated by such institutions as legal structures, unions, and the church. These common ideas are identified through Silverman's extensive field research in interviews and archival records. Her analysis of the dual notions of paternalism and deference in the first part of the book are particularly interesting. She unveils a rich variety of anecdotes that help to define the laboring class as one that owed respect to its betters and was owed charity in times of dearth.

The themes of class and status are woven throughout the book and shown to change over the years, though why the change occurred is not made clear. One suspects that class relationships are largely influenced by education, wealth, and political power. A fact little explored by Silverman is that Irish laborers' incomes increased markedly during the nineteenth century, owing partly to depopulation and partly to higher skill levels. Also unmentioned is the expanding franchise. Thus, the most important explanatory variables are left unmentioned. Silverman explores the manifestations of income differences—such as how the classes were separated in church and in graveyards—as though these distinctions constructed class sensibility (perhaps this flaw points to the difference between the economic and anthropological perspectives).

Some of the book's conclusions are less than startling. Silverman concludes a chapter about labor unions with the finding that wages were "a central labouring concern" (98). Another chapter discovers that personal preferences, experiences, and relationships determined individual laborers' degrees of enthusiasm for organizations or causes. Yet another finds that those who had economic and political power "articulated with working-class life" through the "vehicles of recreation, education and public ritual" (358).

Any economist reading this book, which is ostensibly about political economy, will struggle with the paucity of systematically presented facts and the outright lack of testable hypotheses. Although Silverman claims to marry theory (in particular, that of Antonio Gramsci) with local facts, it is difficult to determine what generalizable points are made, except for the self-evident one that people's understanding of the world around them is influenced by the interweaving of their experiences, preferences, relations, and so on. Moreover, she would have provided a better understanding of how class relations changed, had she shown what happened to relative wages, employment, housing, and education, all variables available in the decennial census and other sources. These criticisms, however, should be viewed in the context of the considerable difficulty of analyzing the development of the collective and individual self-understanding of the laboring classes, a task both challenging and worthwhile.