Class and Collective Action: Writing Stories about Actors and Events

Abstract

In this article I re-visit E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class to find resources for doing historically-grounded studies of class and collective action. Building on Thompson’s work, I argue that historical analyses of collective actors should be both sociologically robust and dramatically persuasive. I begin by reviewing Thompson’s portrayal of class formation in The Making, which I describe as a form of “collective biography.” I discuss some limits of collective biography, including the problems of discontinuity, narrative central subject, and reification. I compare Thompson’s class analysis with that of his contemporary historian Barrington Moore, Jr., as a way of highlighting the problem of representing class actors. I then propose an alternative approach that breaks down the analysis along the dimensions of economy, state, and civil society, in which class functions as a necessary but not exclusive medium of actor formation and historical agency. Finally, I introduce a few examples of historical research from the United States that illustrate the potential for this perspective.