Voluntarism versus Jacobinism: Labor, Nation, and Citizenship in Britain, 1850–1950

Abstract

How did working-class people understand their in the century following the decline of Chartism? This paper discusses the appeal of two contrasting constructions of the national identity and the place of the work ing class within it: voluntarism and Jacobinism. In the voluntarist construc tion, citizenship was located primarily within the associational culture of civil society and the state had a minimal role to play in the lives of working people. Freeborn Englishmen made their own citizenship within a polity that did no more than guarantee negative freedoms. Jacobinism, by con trast, constructed citizenship in a positive relationship between working class organizations and a powerful, transforming state. For Jacobinism the state was the organizer of the popular nation. Speaking very generally, the voluntarist model can be seen as characteristic of nineteenth-century working-class attitudes while Jacobinism reflects the early twentieth century, war-induced encounters between state expansion and working class politics. Voluntarism, however, did not go uncontested by more Jac obin attitudes before 1914, and Jacobinism was held in check through two world wars by the continuing appeal of a far-from-residual voluntarism. Before exploring these versions of citizenship in more detail, some clarification of working assumptions about the relationship between con ceptions of citizenship (and nationality) and conceptions of class is in or der. The central assumption is that identities (at least in complex modern societies) are both pluralistic and interdependent. Class and nation may sometimes place competing claims on individual loyalties, but neither ex ists alone, and they cannot be fully understood in isolation from one anoth er. Discourses of class involve claims about the place of the class in the nation, whether (as with Chartism) the sense of class is partly constituted by exclusion from citizenship, or whether patriotism is being used to ad vance the claims of excluded groups to full membership of the nation. Imagined communities of class and nation were constructed together.l Essentialist notions of class, consequently, are no more helpful to the study of popular mentalities than essentialist notions of nationality. If it is misleading to view national identity as the working out of some essential Englishness, it is no less misguided to treat class ideologically as the ultimate determinant of the destiny of popular political activity. While both class and nation constitute structures that powerfully condition the behav ior of individuals, neither can be understood merely as communities of