The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

[chickenfeet]

Thanks to oursin for pointing me towards Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP, 2001).

I read through the first three chapters at the metro reference library this morning and found much to intrigue and stimulate. I shall return!

The book makes much in the early chapters of the power of any great literature to open new mental vistas and thus to be deeply subversive of established hierarchy. "Contrary to the intentions of the authors, classic conservative texts could make plebeian readers militant and articulate".

There is also some interesting thinking on the need for (class) intellectual autonomy. "No disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life". This is an idea of course which is essential to Gramsci's theories of civil society and, in an extended and very pragmatic form, to the modus operandi of the ILP in first half of this century. In many ways the Clarion Bicycling Club was a deeply subversive organization.

As I get deeper into the book I will be thinking about the relationships between working class intellectual autonomy and Habermas' ideas about democracy and the public sphere as well as the question of whether it is really progressive and egalitarianto replace the literary products of dead white guys with the latest fashionable alternative.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

the Clarion Bicycling Club was a deeply subversive organization

Uh-huh. But one other subversive organisation that I think Rose could have said more about - although to do him justice, there are some specific studies out there - is the Women's Cooperative Guild. Far from feminism being a middle-class indulgence, the WCG were out there arguing for e.g. easier divorce (putting the case for mutual consent divorce in 1909), access to birth control (without any of the agonising over the issue that other bodies went through), well before any other women's organisation, were the first women's organisation to pass a nearly unanimous resolution to legalise abortion and amnesty women in prison for being illegal abortionists, not to mention their inception of the white poppies for peace campaign,

[cibetky.livejournal.com]

...the question of whether it is really progressive and egalitarian...

Of course it's not. ;-) Unless the latest fashionable alternative is good enough to stand hand in hand with those respectable dead white guys.