Popular Paradigms and Welfare Values

Abstract

The above epigraph has been chosen for the way in which it contrasts with those for Chapter 1 (which reminded us of a deeply conservative nineteenth century view that riches and poverty were ordained by God) and Chapter 4 (which reminded us of a reformist nineteenth century view that modernity itself portended the amelioration of class inequality). E.P. Thompson seeks to remind us, first, that the awareness of the nineteenth century working class was forged from an amalgam of conflicting factors and influences and, second, that we are in spite of this the creators of our own history (albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing). As we approach the close of the twentieth century, the object of this book has been to examine the factors and influences which shape popular awareness of poverty and riches, but also to discuss the prospects for social citizenship as a strategy or vehicle by which to challenge or resist the persistence of poverty and riches in the present era.

The making of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory system. Nor should we think of an external force — the ‘industrial revolution’ — working upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity, and turning it out at the other end as a ‘fresh race of beings’. The changing productive relations and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution were imposed, not upon raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman — and the free-born Englishman as Paine had left him or as the Methodists had moulded him. The factory hand or Stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was the object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of political traditions. The working class made itself as much as it was made.

[E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968), p. 213]