The Men of Property: Politics and the Languages of Class in the 1790s

Abstract

Political rhetoric in Ireland in the 1790s — the sharply conflicting vocabularies of reform and disaffection, liberty, innovation. nation, constitution, Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic relief — was saturated by the assumptions, platitudes and invective, in short by the ‘languages’ of ‘class’. Correlations between social position and political affiliation are scarcely stable or clear-cut, but to contemporaries, as to later historians, it seemed apparent that there were indeed alignments between the two. Conservatives routinely understood challenges to the established order in the idiom of class, just as radicals and reformers often diagnosed society’s ills in terms of a corrupt, unjust and ‘monopolising’ aristocratic elite. And in Ireland, inevitably, class antagonisms overlapped and interpenetrated with religious divisions — Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.