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"Angel in the House" Anxiety Alienation Capital "Cash Nexus" Class Commodity Companionate Marriage Conspicuous Consumption Cultural Capital (or Symbolic Capital) Domesticity Doctrine of the Separate Spheres (Public/ Private)

"Dust," "dust-heaps" Gentleman "Gospel of Work" Homosociality Racial Hybridity (Miscegenation) Irony Reification Reform Bills Sensation Fiction Sexuality "Spirit of Capitalism"(Weber) Work Ethic

More period terms and issues (some of them overlap with the list above).
 

Alienation:

•  Alienation, according to Marx:  a brief and cogent definition, courtesy of the Dead Sociologist's Index.
• See also the commodity.

• Essayist and social critic Thomas Carlyle originally uses this term in his essay Chartism (1839), which takes the "Condition of England"  -- and of England's working class -- as its subject.  Carlyle describes the loss of a meaningful relationship between masters and men, between upper and lower classes.

• Carlyle recalls a feudal period in which "the old Aristocracy were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the Lower Classes;  and even, at bottom, that they existed as an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that.  Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens;  not so;  far otherwise!  But it was their happiness that in struggling for their own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in this sense of governing.  For, in one word, Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man;  it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low.  Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high.  With the supreme triumph of Cash, a changed time has entered;  there must a changed Aristocracy enter.  We invite the British reader to meditate earnestly on these things" (193-194).

• Carlyle continues:  "Cash payment the sole nexus;  and there are so many things which cash will not pay!  Cash is a great miracle;  yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even in Earth.  'Supply and demand' we will honour also;  and yet how many 'demands' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply!  ...All men are not patient docile Johnsons;  some of them are half-mad inflammable Rousseaus.  Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far.  Society in France, for example, was not destitute of cash... [T]he time has come when [Laissez-faire] must either cease or a worse thing straightaway begin, -- a thing of tinderboxes, vitriol-bottles, secondhand pistols, a visibly insupportable thing in the eyes of all" (199-200).
From Thomas Carlyle, "Chartism," Selected Writings  (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1971).

• Class theory, according to Karl Marx - Class positions derive from relations of production (DSI).
• Class, status, and power, according to Weber - Weber's view of the 'status group,' defined not only according to their labor, but also according to their different modes of consumption ( DSI).

• "The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind...  Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production" (125).

• The useful material values of a commodity constitute its "use-value," as Marx calls it.  "If we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour.  But even the product of labour has already been transformed in our hands.  It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing.  All its sensuous (i.e. material) characteristics are extinguished... [The concrete forms of labor that produced these objects] can longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract...  There is nothing left of [these products of labor] ... but the same phantom-like objectivity;  they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure" (128).

• "Commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it...  But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" (164)

• "Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity?...  The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.  Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.  Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social.  It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (164-165).

• A link defining some related Marxist terms (use value, exchange value)

• Stone on changes in the marriage ideal:  "Once it was doubted that affection could and would naturally develop after marriage, decision-making power had to be transferred to the future spouses themselves, and more and more of them in the eighteenth century began to put the prospects of emotional satisfaction before the ambition for increased income or status.  This in turn also had its effect in equalizing relationships between husband and wife" (325).  "This demand for love as the basis of marriage involved a fundamental change in power relations within the family" (326).  Stone observes "a shift of marital choice from parents to children," which "would have significant effects upon marital relations thereafter" (326-7).

• For powerful social groups in the early nineteenth century, companionate marriage was more the rule than the exception:   "Among the lesser nobility, the squirearchy and gentry {Emma fits in here}... [t]he choice of a spouse was increasingly left in the hands of the children themselves and was based mainly on temperamental compatibility with the aim of lasting companionship.  The wife concerned herself with household management, entertainment and leisure activities.  She also often closely supervised, in an increasingly permissive mode, the upbringing of the young children, while also maintaining contact by correspondence and visits with the closer relatives among the kin.  The husband and wife were closely bonded by affective ties, and the wife was normally both faithful and obedient to her husband.  The husband might well have a few extramarital sexual adventures, but they were not allowed to break up the marriage.  Many of these marriages were also accompanied by legal settlements which protected the wife's property, and decision-making power tended to be shared rather than monopolized by the husband" (392).

• "The lead sectors of the society, where the most significant changes took place earliest and with widest impact, were the wealthy professional and landed classes.  This group formed a fairly homogeneous social unit, tightly bound together for the first time by a unified culture, and by a common desire to pursue whatever was the fashionable mode" (394).

• Marriage in other social groups (by 1800):

"[T]he most common type of marriage for the highest court aristocracy was the one in which parents retained considerable influence over the choice of spouse and in which economic, social or political considerations were often still paramount" (392).

Marriage among the propertyless poor:  "Since neither had any capital to contribute to the union, parental direction was minimal, pre-nuptial sexual relations were common, and freedom of choice was the norm" (393).

"The development of free courtship and companionate marriage at the peasant level was a direct consequence of the early economic independence of the children afforded by the rise of a cottage industry.  In contrast to the rich, changing ideology played no part in this transformation of interpersonal relationships among the rural smallholders and tenant farmers.  It was economic, not ideological, considerations which made possible the stratified diffusion downward of the 'erotic consciousness' first developed for other reasons among the squirearchy and the upper bourgeoisie" (362).

"Cross-class marriages were universally condemned in theory and very rare in practice.  The only notable exceptions were the very infrequent occasions when a nobleman actually married his mistress" (394)

From:  Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800  (New York:  Harper and Row, 1977).

Cultural Capital:

Conspicuous Consumption  (See also Cultural Capital, Gentleman)

• Conspicuous consumption, according to turn-of-the-century sociologist Thornstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (click here for a lengthier selection):

In order to be successful, conspicuous consumption must result in a show of good manners and cultivated tastes:  "This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating, drinking, etc., presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male, --the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of the aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption."

How do practices of conspicuous consumption register class differences? "The basis on which good repute in any highly organised industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue as far down the scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata in which the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part delegated to the wife and children of the household."

• Veblen and "The Anatomy of Competition":  Discusses conspicuous consumption as a form of competitive advantage and a way of displaying social "reputability." (DSI)

Homosociality:

• According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "'[h]omosocial' is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex;  it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with 'homosexual,' and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from 'homosexual.'  In fact, it is applied to such activities as 'male bonding,' which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality" (1).

• "To draw the 'homosocial' back into the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual -- a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted... My hypothesis of the unbrokenness of this continuum is not a genetic one-- I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as 'at the root of' other forms of male homosociality -- but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men's relations with other men" (1-2).

Work Ethic, or "The Spirit of Capitalism":

• Max Weber on the "Spirit of Capitalism" (excerpt), from  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (DSI):  What sorts of historical explanations, Weber asks, can we find for the desire to make more and more money, while avoiding "all spontaneous enjoyment of life"?  ("[W]hose intellectual child [was] the particular concrete form of rational thought... , from which the idea of a calling and the devotion to labour in the calling has grown"?).  He credits the rise of this capitalist spirit to attitudes fostered by Protestantism.