1. Class in the Making of the Modern World
Dr Anna Ross
Christian Borchert, Familienportraits I (c. 1980).

2. Introduction What is class?
Karl Marx
E. P. Thompson
David Cannadine, John Lawrence, and others
What does this look like in historical analysis?
Helga Paris, Untitled from the series Häuser und Gesichter, Halle

3. Definitions (I): Karl Marx (1818-83)

4. Marx’s Theory of History
Known as: historical materialism
Constructed from a variety of texts:
The German Ideology (1845)
Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Class: objective economic category
Class struggle: All history is the history
of class struggle

5. Definitions (II): E. P. Thompson (1924-93)

6. Thompson’s Approach to History
The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
Class: Class was a relationship
“class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”

7. Definitions (III)
Historians today such as David Cannadine, John Lawrence, and others
Cannadine:
Class and class identities are inherently constructed
They are part of highly politicized representations of the social order, rather than neutral descriptions of class relations
Lawrence:
Further warns us that vernacular uses of ‘class as culture’ were (and are) profoundly inconsistent and contradictory.

8. Case Study: the “bourgeois century”