The working-class as a subject in conceptual history

While early modern conceptual history is usually centred on the intellectual production of professional thinkers, studying conceptual change during the age of the masses requires another methodology. Intellectuals are no longer the primary actors of conceptual change: collective entities are. But how can a social entity speak, develop a specific language and impose it in the public sphere? Mostly, they did so through the creation of collective organisations and media that are authorised (or that authorise themselves) to speak on their behalf. As a result, from the nineteenth century onwards, social groups were constructed as discursive entities not only through discourses on them, but also through discourses made on their behalf, that both shaped the groups themselves (cf. Bourdieu’s theory of representation) and the political language itself. The working-class was one of the first social groups in history to be constructed a collective historical actor that could act and speak as a unified group. In this paper, I will focus on the process of emergence of the working-class as a political subject in the 19th century and present some of the consequences it had on political concepts. First, the working-class was constructed as a political subject, but based on a social reality, making it a socially embedded political subject; therefore, it played a major role in the process of expansion of political debates beyond the traditional realm of government to include the economic organisation of society. Second, the working-class was constructed through the formation of mass organisations that used procedures to ensure the representativeness of their spokespersons; it thus contributed to define the proper way to build a representative collective that can participate as such to the controversies around political concepts. Finally, the working-class was constructed as a transnational or global collective being, playing thus a key role in the internationalisation of political concepts.