Contours of Class Afterwards

Our discussion on Monday about class in the early American republic centered around two powerful questions which each carry import not only for historians of class, but for the entire historical profession. Our first question rose primarily from the Osborn article on doctors and alcohol abuse in Philadelphia. His description of the way doctors consciously or subconsciously used diagnoses of alcohol abuse to either legitimate a failed merchant’s fall from wealth, or delegitimize the behavior of the poor led us to ask: who creates class? Can individuals (or small groups) take part in the construction of class realities and identities, or do classes come about as the result of some vast structural development of markets and economic relations? Furthermore, does every individual action carry implications for class? Or can we put some defining boundary around “acts of class”? Though for a while we seemed stuck without an operative definition of class as either an identity or an external mode of analysis, I liked Jonathan’s attempt to see class in a different way – as a motive. His hypothesis is borne out by many of the works we have read thus far this semester. Christopher’s portrayal of slave ship sailors shows how they acted against both the power structures above them and those below. Though perhaps sailors could have identified with their captives and rebelled against the social order, they chose instead to maintain a separate identity from those they enslaved. This class act, as Christopher seems to explain, was an assertion of their own interests in safeguarding their freedom. The constitution of sailors as a class grew not from some shared identity nor from structural forces which determined their economic and social interests, but rather from the motive of freedom.

Our second main question emerged from both the Gienapp and Johnson readings, and returns to the debates we have been having all semester about the place of the historian in constructing history. Gienapp takes Sellers to task for letting the ideologies of his time seep into the writing he does about the past. He argues that seeing class struggle as operative in the Jacksonian period is just patently false. Gienapp’s bias toward sixties radicalism and anti-capitalism must have led him to this erroneous conclusion. But as some in our class suggested, Gienapp’s own classless reading of history is also informed by the late 1990s period of “the end of history” where liberal capitalism seemed to have prevailed and class was supposed to disappear as a method of analysis. But while we could agree that all historians’ work is informed by their ideological positions, their place in society, and the biases of their archive, and that those who still claim objectivity “should be hanged,” we did not in my opinion reach a satisfactory conclusion as to the relationship between the past and the present. The underlying question seems to be fundamental to the study of history: in a post-structuralist framework, can we still say that historians aim to uncover the truth of what actually happened in the past? Or is historical inquiry so colored by the historian’s position in the present that the histories we tell are simply reflections of ourselves, and not of any past reality? This returns us to some of the questions we asked at the beginning of the semester about how class analysis, especially, can persist within an historical discipline which has admitted that the subjectivity of language and documentation limits the extent to which we can make solid conclusions about material reality in the past.

Though Mike was understandably anxious about finishing the first question before moving onto the second, I think the natural flow of our discussion indicates the extent to which these issues are linked. In fact, Johnson’s article tries in some ways to deal with both together. He shows how writing agency and individual power in shaping identity into the past was an exercise which was important and even revolutionary for the white scholars of the 1960s but which now serves more as therapy than politics (121). One could probably make a similar argument that the historiography which sees class or any mechanism of the past as structural and external to those who lived within it served a certain political purpose for the scholars who wrote in this vein. The identity/structure or agency/determinist debate, then, is just as much about the present as it is about the past. Johnson suggests that as historians we embrace our subjectivity and, while attempting to uncover what actually happened in the past, also admit that we are not necessarily attempting to get closer “the Truth” but rather constructing a truth about the past which serves a purpose in the present. While we don’t have to give up our aspiration to reconstruct what happened in the past, we do have to be transparent and self-critical about why we end up writing particular stories, and perhaps even suggest alternative and contrary stories which could be written in other contexts.

In reading for another class, I recently came across a quote which speaks to this issue. Roger Chartier, in a book called On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, writes, “Narrow is the way, therefore, for anyone who refuses to reduce history to an untrammeled literary activity open to chance and worthy only of curiosity, yet also refuses to define its scientific character based on the one model of knowledge concerning the physical world” (27). In the last few weeks of the semester, I hope to explore further how we as historians can walk this narrow road, acknowledging both the subjectivity of history, but also its dignity and importance as a discipline that uncovers a past which is real and truthful.

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