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The Measure of Popular Culture A Review Article
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
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- Type
- The Traditions of Populist Politics
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989
References
For commentary on earlier drafts of this article, I am grateful to Bill Beik, Paul Faler, Laura Frader, Lou Ferleger, Jim Green, Bob Hannigan, Bruce Laurie, Peter Linebaugh, Don Reid, Judith Silver, and Peggy Somers. None should be held responsible for the final product. If only I could have done justice to all of their insightful criticisms.
1 Kousser, J. Morgan, in American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 855–56.Google Scholar For a more general “materialist” statement and a review of recent positions taken, see Paige, Jeffery, “Social Theory and Peasant Revolution in Vietnam and Guatemala,” Theory and Society, 12 (1983), 699–737.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Hahn cites “Thompsonian” historians of the urban United States such as Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983);Google Scholar and Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York, 1983).Google Scholar Also important are Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976);Google ScholarLaurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980);Google Scholar and Faler, Paul, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany, 1981).Google Scholar Among the many contributions to the base/superstructure debate triggered by Thompson's work, see especially Green, James, “Populism, Socialism, and the Promise of Democracy,” Radical History Review, 24 (1980), 7–40;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “Culture, Politics and Workers' Response to Indust?alization,” Radical America, 16 (spring 1982), 101–26;Google Scholar and idem, “People's History and Socialist Theory: A Review Essay,” Radical History Review, 28–30 (1984), 169–86.Google Scholar For Hahn's references to studies on peasants, see Roots, 95 n.15; 269 n.1; 326–27. A recent discussion, with references, is found in Skocpol, Theda, “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary,” Comparative Politics, 14 (1982), 351–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On relevant French scholarship, see Hunt, David, “Working People of France and Their Historians,” Radical History Review, 28–30 (1984), 45–65.Google Scholar
3 On hegemony and consent, see Anderson, Perry, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review, 100 (1977), 5–78;Google ScholarNield, Keith and Seed, John, “Waiting for Gramsci,” Social History, 6 (1981), 209–27;CrossRefGoogle ScholarEley, Geoff, “Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-speaking World, 1957–82,” European History Quarterly, 14 (1984), 441–78;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, with references to the literature on Populism, Lears, T. J. Jackson, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review (90 (1985), 567–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Especially important to me in puzzling over these issues has been Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).Google Scholar For another “Gramscian” analysis of Southern society in this period, see Wiener, Jonathan, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978).Google Scholar
4 Hahn further suggests that authority over slaves was part of “the patriarchal household economy” (Roots, 31), and that white racism illustrates a general antagonism, found throughout history, of “petty property owners toward the propertyless poor” (ibid., 90; see also 27).
5 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform from Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955).Google Scholar For a restatement, see Turner, James, “Understanding the Populists,” Journal of American History, 67 (1980), 368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hahn's epilogue shows the influence of Lawrence Goodwyn, who portrays the defeat of Populism as a turning point in United States history, after which “mass folkways of resignation” took hold: The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978), xiii.Google Scholar
6 My interest in this kind of inconsistency was first aroused while puzzling over Georges Lefebvre's work on the French Revolution. Lefebvre's schematic formulations, which at times suggest that peasant communalism was a kind of suprahistorical class “essence,” fail to account for all of rural politics during the Revolution. More than once, he is obliged to abandon autonomy and to replace it with an equally arbitrary class essence, this time of deference and passivity. The revolts of France's “rough, tough, and violent” peasants were, Lefebvre affirms, etched in “letters of fire.” But he is also capable of stating that agrarian populations failed politically because they “knew of national life only what it pleased the parish priest, the bourgeois, and the affluent to tell them.” Peasants who in 1789 embodied “the warlike spirit of the Revolution” mysteriously evolved by 1793 into passive creatures, so isolated from the mainstream of French life that “revolutionary idealism” could reach them only “with difficulty”: see Lefebvre, Georges, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, White, Joan, trans. (New York, 1973 original French ed., 1932), 21, 203, 209;Google Scholar and idem., Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (1924; Paris, 1963), 328.Google Scholar On “essential” views of social classes, see Eley, Geoff and Nield, Keith, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” Social History, 5 (1980), 261, 269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Lefebvre's still incomparable contribution, see Hunt, David, “Peasant Politics in the French Revolution,” Social History, 9 (1984), 277–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 The ambiguity of spacial metaphors is evident in French history, where peasants lived “far away” from the state in some respects (the upper class found rural patois and rituals incomprehensible), but all too “close” in others (especially when it came to paying taxes). Stressing the opacity of rural society to a very late date is Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976).Google Scholar But peasants had fought and lost a series of battles against state taxation fully two centuries earlier; Bercé, Yves-Marie provides a representative account in Histoire des Croquants. Elude des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Geneva, 1974).Google Scholar For a narrative stressing attacks against Native Americans, prominently featuring the Georgia campaigns of Andrew Jackson, “the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history,” see Zinn, Howard, A People's History of the United States (New York, 1980), 125.Google Scholar
8 In France, the idea that a communal way of life among peasants was based on the agrarian system is given classic expression in Bloch, Marc, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, Sondheimer, Janet, trans. (Berkeley, 1970; original French ed., 1931).Google Scholar It has been questioned by Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, “De la crise ultime a la vraie croissrice,” pt. 3 of Lage classique, 1340–1789, in Duby, Georges and Wallop, Armand, eds., Histoire de la France rurale (Paris, 1975), II, 527;Google Scholar see also the argument and references in Jones, Peter, “Parish, Seigneurie and the Community of Inhabitants in Southern Central France during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Past and Present, no. 91 (1981), 74–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 On the wonders to be accomplished with migration data, see Garden, Maurice, Lyon et les lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1971);Google ScholarLequin, Yves, Les ouvriers de la riégion lyonnaise (1848–1914), 2 vols. (Lyon, 1977);Google Scholar and Sewell, William, Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820–1870 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar For a discussion stressing religious themes within the populist movement, see Palmer, Bruce, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980). In this respect, too, Hahn recalls Goodwyn, whose Populism has very shallow “roots.” In Goodwyn's The Populist Moment, it is prefigured politically (a “movement culture” of solidarity and self-respect), but not socially (a “received culture” of hierarchy and intimidation).Google Scholar
10 Hahn several times affirms that farmers shared with artisans a “revolutionary republican heritage,” but provides no evidence that yeomen saw themselves as heirs to 1776 (see Roots, 10, 107, 240, 254). Sophisticated analysis of popular resistance to “modernization” during the French Revolution is found in Bois, Paul, Paysans de 1'Ouest. Des structures écoriomiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l'époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (1960; Paris, 1984);Google Scholar and Tilly, Charles, The Vendée (1964; Cambridge, Mass., 1976). Pinpointing the moment when glacier-like old regimes finally gave way, modernization theorists often assume that longstocding social formations are immobile (see, for example, Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen). Others argue that durability in a culture must be a sign of its adaptive capabilities. In his treatment of an agrarian system “older than the most venerable stones,” Marc Bloch declares: “Our villages wear an ancient dress, but one that has often been made over. Deliberate refusal to notice and investigate these changes is tantamount to a denial of life itself, since all life is change: (French Rural History, xxix–xxx).Google Scholar
11 On “intermediaries,” see Bois on republican weavers, in Paysans de l' Ouest; Maurice Agulhon on artisans and students, in The Republic of the Villages: Populations of the Var from the Revolution to the Second Republic, Lloyd, Janet, trans. (New York, 1981;Google Scholar original French ed., 1970); Corbin, Alain on tramping masons, in Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe sierile, 1845–1880), 2 vols. (Paris, 1975);Google Scholar and Ted Margadant on Montagnard secret societies, in French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, 1979).Google Scholar On “relay stations” (“connections” in the translation, “relais” in the original), see Agulhon, Republic, 54. On plasticity in general, see Agulhon, Republic; and, with heightened class consciousness presented almost as an exercise in collective cognition, Sewell, William, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Important recent texts on agrarian populations neglect this aspect. James Scott's “moral economy of the peasant” is an “essentialist” conception, in the sense discussed in note 6; see his Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar and, among later statements, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society, 4 (1977), 1–38, 211–46.Google ScholarShociri's, TheodorThe Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia, 1910–1925 (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar is more focused on village determination to block change than on the internal transformations wrought by war and revolution. Robert Brenner presents a tragic picture of agrarian populations whose victories in France “meant poverty and a self-perpetuating cycle of backwardness,” in “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present, no. 70 (1976), 75.Google Scholar