I wish to thank Henry Berger, Derek Hirst, and Reeve Huston for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. This school of thought is discussed in Eley, Geoff and Nield, Keith, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?xs” Social History 5 (05 1980): 249–71.Google Scholar

2. See Scott, Joan Wallach, “Social History and the History of Socialism: French Socialist Municipalities in the 1890s,” Le mouvement social (04–06 1980): 145–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, fora critique of this interpretation.

3. See Cottereau, Alain, “The Distinctiveness of Working-Class Cultures in France, 1848–1900,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (Princeton, 1986), 111–12.Google Scholar

4. Meyer, Siegfried to Marx, Karl, Holidaysburg, Pa., 08 30, 1871Google Scholar, D 3428, Marx-Engels Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

5. Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1928), 167Google Scholar; Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, 1976), 194–219.Google Scholar

6. On “essentialist” social history, see Eley, and Nield, , “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” 266Google Scholar; Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism; Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920,” International Labor and Working Class History 26 (Fall 1984): 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. For examples of ethnoculturalist political history, see Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; Kleppner, Paul, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York, 1970).Google Scholar See Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar for the argument that politics served as a safety valve for labor radicalism; see the useful review of “why no socialism in America” arguments focusing on the American political system in Foner, Eric, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop Journal 17 (Spring 1984): 68–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Under the rubric “new social history” or “new urban history” can be included the pioneering mobility studies of Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, 1964)Google Scholar and The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970, as well as the pathbreaking analyses of working-class formation by Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Susan, Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of the Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978)Google Scholar; Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; and Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

9. One thinks of the urban social mobility studies on this score. For critiques of the assumptions of these works, see Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., “The Political Crisis of Social History,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976): 205–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Henretta, James A., “The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias,” Labor History 18 (1977): 165–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. On the importance of the daily workings of the machinery of state to understanding power relations in nineteenth-century America, see Montgomery, David, “Gutman's Nineteenth-Century America,” Labor History 19 (Summer 1978): 416–29, esp. 428–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Investigation of the relationship of workers to the lower levels of jurisdiction of the courts, to the party primary system at the ward level, and to the shopkeepers, lawyers, and small-time politicians who dominated these arenas, is crucial to making sense of the daily operation of the state in this epoch.

11. I say “renewed” attention, because (at least) the institutional bases of authority were the concern of the institutional history that originated around the turn of this century and has gone out of vogue over the last two decades. See Wilson, Woodrow, “The Study of Public Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (06 1887): 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a seminal article. Important later examples of American institutional political history include the works of Leonard White; studies of political economy by Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin and Louis Hartz, cited in note 20; Rothman, David, Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869–1901 (Cambridge, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For examples of American institutional labor history, see Ashworth, John H., The Helper and American Trade Unions (Baltimore, 1915)Google Scholar; Hollander, Jacob H. and Barnett, George E., Studies in American Trade Unionism (New York, 1912)Google Scholar; Commons, John R. et al. , History of Labor in the United States, 4 vols. (New York, 1918–1935)Google Scholar; and more recently, Soffer, Benson, “A Theory of Trade Union Development: The Role of the ‘Autonomous’ Workman,” Labor History 1 (Spring 1960):141–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. For a theoretical discussion of how societies define authority, see Shils, Edward, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), 3–90Google Scholar; for a historian's interpretation and application of Shils, see Bender, Thomas, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (06 1986): 120–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion of how workers define authority, and the crucial significance of organization in all its economic, cultural, and political forms to workers, who are “almost by definition … people who cannot make things happen except collectively.…,” see Hobsbawm, Eric, “Notes on Class Consciousness,” in Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York, 1984), esp. 25–27.Google Scholar

13. See Wilson, Woodrow, “Public Administration”Google Scholar; Weber, Max, Economy and Society, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (1922, repr., New York, 1968), vol. 2, ch. 9; vol. 3, chs. 10–13Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge, 1985), 9.Google Scholar For examples of “state-centered” explanations of political change, see Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shefter, Martin, “Party, Bureaucracy, and Political Change in the United States,” in Political Parties: Development and Decay, ed. Maisel, Louis and Cooper, Joseph (Beverly Hills, 1978), 211–65.Google Scholar

14. See Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (1963, repr., New York, 1966), esp. 711–832.Google Scholar

15. Jones, Gareth Stedman, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (New York, 1983), 2Google Scholar, quoted in Katznelson, Ira, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation, ed. Katznelson, and Zolberg, , 11Google Scholar; Eley, and Nield, , “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” 249–71.Google Scholar

16. Kocka, Jürgen, “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800–1875,” in Working-Class Formation, ed. Katznelson, and Zolberg, , 283.Google Scholar

17. Perrot, Michelle, “On the Formation of the French Working Class,” Working-Class Formation, 92–101.Google Scholar

18. Nolan, Mary, “Economic Crisis, State Policy, and Working Class Formation in Germany, 1870–1900,” Working-Class Formation, 392.Google Scholar

19. Zolberg, Aristide R., “How Many Exceptionalisms?” Working-Class Formation, 426, 430.Google Scholar

20. See Handlin, Oscar and Handlin, Mary Flug, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (1947, repr., Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar; Hartz, Louis, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, 1948).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On other views of the importance of the timing of American democratization, see, for example, Bendix, Reinhard, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, for the argument that American workers were less angry about industrialization than their European counterparts because early suffrage served as “compensation.”

21. Bridges, , A City in the Republic, 148, for one instance.Google Scholar

22. Ibid.

23. See Bernstein, Iver, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance in American Society and Politics (New York, forthcoming, 1988), esp. chs. 3, 6, and 7.Google Scholar

24. Saxton, Alexander, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 3–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mink, Gwendolyn, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca, 1986)Google Scholar; also see Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1960), 261–300Google Scholar, on antebellum Republicans' racial outlook.

25. Such questions are suggested by the discussion of women's participation in nineteenth-century politics in Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (06 1984): 620–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Baker calls for a broadening of the definition of the political realm similar to the one I am proposing here.

26. See Dorfman, Joseph, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York, 1946–1949), 5 vols.Google Scholar, for a too often ignored treatment of American political economy sensitive to a broad range of cultural issues.

27. See Shefter, , “Trade Unions and Political Machines”Google Scholar; also, Schorske, Carl E., German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955), esp. 88–110.Google Scholar

28. See Bernstein, , The New York City Draft Riots, chs. 3 and 7Google Scholar, on changing definitions of the boundary between economic and political action among New York City groups between 1850 and 1872.