Introduction to the Symposium on Class in the Early Republic

Historiographical news flash: class is back in the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American history. At the 2003 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, participants in a panel titled "The American Revolution: Old Questions, New Perspectives" focused most of their attention on class and class dynamics, arguing they had been too long ignored by established scholars in the field. At the 2004 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in Providence, Rhode Island, there was a panel titled "Class: A Useful Category of Analysis for the Early Republic?" from which the ensuing collection of essays emerged. Once again a group of up-and-coming scholars insisted that the question of class must henceforth be placed front-and-center on scholarly agendas.

But if class is back, where had it gone? Some readers of the JER may be surprised to learn that it was ever absent. Even in the heyday of the so-called neo-Whig reinterpretation of the American Revolution, Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, Alfred Young, Gary Nash, and Ronald Hoffman, among others, raised their voices on behalf of a class-based, neo-Progressive alternative perspective. Many of the "new" social historians who came of graduate-school age in the late 1960s and 1970s considered class central to their enterprise of revisioning American history "from the bottom up." Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, even as "race, class, and gender" became a mantra among progressive scholars, the exploration of cultural identity increasingly displaced the study of political economy—and with it class analysis. To be sure, Charles Sellers's monumental The Market Revolution ran against this trend, but Sellers interpreted American social and political development more as a contest between subsistence-agrarian and commercial cultures than as a struggle between classes per se.¹ Although class did not disappear as an analytical tool or interpretive category, confidence in its explanatory power diminished as historians made the "cultural turn." Indeed, "whiteness" became a hot new field in nineteenth-century (and later, twentieth-century) studies in part because the deconstruction of racial identities seemed to explain what class analysis by itself could not: the failure of American workers to unite in opposition to their capitalist oppressors.²

The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union undoubtedly contributed to the shift away from class analysis with its Marxist associations. Just as Daniel Bell had proclaimed the "end of ideology" in 1960, Francis Fukuyama in 1992 proclaimed the "end of history."³ The subsequent resurgence of the American economy and rapid expansion of multinational corporate enterprise suggested that democratic capitalism really was an unstoppable universal force. Yet even at the peak of American prosperity in the late 1990s, critics warned that globalization benefited the few at the expense of the many. Once the New Economy bubble burst, class regained saliency as an analytic category both inside and outside the academy. Last spring The New York Times conferred its imprimatur on this intellectual development by publishing a multipart series aptly titled "Class Matters."

What are the implications of the return of class for our understanding of the early American republic? That is the question addressed by the papers that follow, and the answers vary from author to author in large measure because they employ different conceptions of class. In his discussion of workers' experience, Seth Rockman argues that "historians should use class as a heuristic for the economic power relations of capitalism." For him, class is about material realities, not subjective experience or collective consciousness. Thus he distances himself from E. P. Thompson's famous dictum that "class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate their identity as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs."⁴ Whether or not historical actors think in class terms, Rockman asserts, their behavior is shaped by class dynamics, which in turn are driven by the disparities of power intrinsic to capitalism as an economic...