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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Calhoun's Class Struggle,
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This review is from: The question of class struggle: Social foundations of popular radicalism during the industrial revolution (Hardcover)
Craig Calhoun's Question of Class Struggle is a labored exploration of "popular radicalism", or opposition to industrialization and capitalism, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Much of Calhoun's book is a systematic refutation of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which Thompson suggests that popular movements such as Jacobism and Luddism were part of a broad "working-class consciousness" derived from a shared history of exploitation and powerlessness. Thompson goes so far as to impart to the British proletariat a "heroic culture" based on this struggle.
According to Calhoun, Thompson and others (including Karl Marx) have concocted this idea of working-class solidarity out of a profound romantic misreading of history, if not out of whole cloth. Instead, any collaboration between individual workers was a result of their close-knit professional community, primarily the organizations of particular craftsmen, and their grievances were broadly anti-capitalist (Calhoun calls them "populist") and anti-government rather than class-conscious as such. Reactions to this work have been generally negative. Most reviewers thought that Calhoun spends too much energy refuting the arguments of Thompson and others, while offering few original insights, thus creating far more questions than he answers. Even reviewers who appreciate Calhoun's specific criticisms of previous scholarship are disappointed in Calhoun himself. For instance, in the American Historical Review, Robert Glen acknowledges that Calhoun provides "enlightening critiques" but notes that in certain chapters, the "intricate interplay of mistakes and misconceptions ... amounts to a veritable fugue of misinformation." With somewhat more restraint, Charles Tilly in Social Forces notes that Calhoun's "heart does not belong to construction, but to criticism". These are typical of the mixed, but mostly negative, reactions to this book.
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