Money and Liberty in Modern Europe A Critique of Historical Understanding [Paperback]

Professor Reddy proposes to replace class with an alternative concept that seeks to capture from a new angle the fundamental relations of exchange and authority that have shaped social life in modern Europe.Professor Reddy proposes to replace class with an alternative concept that seeks to capture from a new angle the fundamental relations of exchange and authority that have shaped social life in modern Europe.The concept of class, along with its correlates -m class interest, class conflict, class consciousness - ramain indispensable tools of historical explanation. Yet research over the last twenty-five years, especially on the histories of England, France, and Germany, has revealed an increasingly poor fit between these concepts and the reality they purport to explain. Some historians have reacted by rejecting class; others have proposed bold revisions in our understanding of it that enable it to encompass new research findings. This study does neither. Instead, building on interpretive method Professor Reddy proposes to replace class with an alternative concept that seeks to capture from a new angle the fundamental relations of exchange and authority that have shaped social life in modern Europe.Preface; 1. The crisis of the class concept in historical research; 2. Meaning and its material base; 3. Growth of the liberal illusion; 4. Money and the rights of man in 1789; 5. Challenging one's master in the nineteenth century: from Silesia to Lancashire; 6. Conclusion: the poor and their partisans; Notes; Index.'Money and Liberty is an ambitious, wide-ranging book that is bound to provoke controversy and a rethinking of much of European historical writing on social class. It will be read with profit by scholars in a wide variety of fields.' Lynn Hunt, University of California, Berkeley