This list contains Marxist analyses, but also sociological ones.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1987.
Corfield, Penelope J. "Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain." In Language, History, and Class. Ed. Penelope Corfield. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. 101-30.
Accdg to Poovey, she "discusses the various uses of the word class in the eighteenth century."
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy." In Dimock. 57-106.
Dimock, Wai Chee, and Michael T. Gilmore, eds. Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1994.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich. "The Professional-Managerial Class." In Between Labour and Capital. Ed. Pat Walker. Montreal: Black Rose P, 1979.
Guillory, John. "Literary Critics as Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of the Humanities." In Dimock. 107-49.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1977.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Labouring Men. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964.
Hont, Istvan and Michael Ignatieff, eds. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Janowitz, Anne. "Class and Literature: the Case of Romantic Chartism." In Dimock. 239-66.
Jones, Gareth Stedman. Languages of Class: Studies in Working-Class History, 1832-1982. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Kamenka, Eugene, and R. S. Neale, eds. Feudalism, Capitalism, and Beyond. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.
Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I. 1867. Trans. Ben Fowkes. N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1977.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Mary Poovey says that McKeon discusses "the debate about what the term class describes--about whether it refers to an objective set of material conditions (or relations) that can be observed in every modern society, or to a mode of understanding or articulating one's place in a social hierarchy, which only became available in the nineteenth century" (Poovey 15; see McKeon 163-4).
Neale, R. S. "The Bourgeoisie, Historically, has played a most Revolutionary Part." In Kamenka and Neale. 85-102. About confusions between the terms "bourgeois" and "middle class."
"For R. S. Neale, following Maurice Dobb, what is most important about this development of agrarian capitalism is that the "revolutionary class," the class that contributed most towards the establishment of a modern bourgeois state and prepared the ground for industrialization, was in Britain not to be found among the urban bourgeoisie but among the rural landowners. The rationalization of agricultural technologeis, teh formation of a laboring class supporting itself entirely by means of wage labor, and the ideology of intensive estate improvement and industry at home that Britain might rule an empire abroad all preceded the industrialization of manufacturing per se: `What Dobb argues, and what a good deal of recent research shows, is that because of various peculiarities in English agriculture and society capitalism and capitalists developed within the rural sector" [Neale p. 76]. Working from [23 / 24] demographic evidence, David Levine argues for the "proletarianization" of eighteenth-century agricultural and artisanal labor. According to Levine, the factory system of the nineteenth century did not so much implant a new work regimen and new "industrial" social relations on a previously antithetical agrarian model as "superimpose" the demands of the factory as a workplace upon an already deracinated and struggling rural proletariat [David Levine, "Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Upheaval" in Essays on the Family and Historical Change, ed. Leslie Page Moch (College Station, Texas, 1983), pp. 9-34]. . . . Both Neale and Levine provide historical models for understanding the emergent class consciousness evident in much working-women's verse and seemingly `in advance' of what previous historiography would have harnessed firmly to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century" (Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 23-4).
Petty, William. "Political Arithmetic." 1690.
Petty has been called by Marx the first capitalist theoretician, i.e. the first "political economist": "by classical political economy, I mean all the economists who, since the time of W. Petty, have investigated the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production . . ." (Capital 174-5 n. 34). This particular work by Petty describes the division of labor.
Pocock, J. G. A. "Early Modern Capitalism--The Augustan Perception." In Kamenka and Neale. 62-83.
---. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly on the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Poovey, Mary. "The Social Constitution of `Class': Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking." In Dimock. 14-56.
Reddy, William M. Money and liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. 1776. The first three chapters discuss the division of labor.
Spufford, Peter. Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1986.
Steuart, James. An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. 2 vols. 1767.
Tawney, Richard H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. N.Y.: New American Library, 1947. Ian Watt relies on Tawney (Richetti 99).
Thompson, E. P., "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Journal of Social History (May 1978): 133-65.
"It is true that class in its modern usage arises within nineteenth-century industrual capitalist society. That is, class in its modern usage only became available to the cognitive system of the people then living at the time. . . . [I]n the analysis of societies prior to the industrial revolution. . . . , the correspondence of the category to the historical evidence then becomes very much less direct. If class was not available within people's own cognitive system, if they saw themselves and fought out their own historical battles in terms of `estates' or `ranks' or `orders,' etc., then if we describe these struggles in class terms we must exert caution against any tendency to read back subsequent notations of class" (148).
"To put it bluntly: classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), the identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues, and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in a real historical process.35 [35 Hobsbawm, E. J. "Class Consciousness in History," in Istvan Meszaros, ed., Aspects of History and Class Consciousness (1971): "For the purposes of the historian . . . class and the problem of class consciousness are inseparable. Class in the full sense only comes into existence at the historical moment when classes begin to acquire consciousness of themselves as such" (6).] (149). "Let us return, then, to the special case of the eighteenth century. We shall expect to find class struggle but we need not expect to find nineteenth-century cases of class. . . . In my own practice I find the notion of gentry-crowd reciprocity, of the "paternalism-deference equilibrium" . . . more helpful than notions of a "one-class society" or of consensus" (150). aristocracy and gentry and/vs. plebeians "plebs" (144-5) = "polite culture" and/vs. "a customary popular culture"; as to the latter, Thompson says, "I would hestitate before I described this as a class culture, in the sense that one can speak of a working-class culture, within which children were socialized into a value-system with distinct class notations, in the nineteenth century. But one cannot understand this culture, in its experiential ground, in its resistance to religious homily, in its picaresque flouting of the provident bourgeois virtues, in its ready recourse to disorder, and int is ironic attitudes towards the Law, unless one employes the concept of the dialectical antagonisms, adjustments, and (sometimes) reconciliations, of class. When analysing gentry-plebs relations . . . . , I am therefore employing the terminology of class conflict while resisting the attribution of identity to a class" (151).
Mary Poovey describes this article: "For an argument that `class' as a concept is historically specific and a description of an objective set of conditions, see [Thompson's "Class Struggle without a Class?"] 147-50."
Thompson, E. P.The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz, 1963.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904-5. Trans. Talcott Parsons. 1930. Intro. Anthony Giddens. N.Y.: Routledge, 1992.