The state, the workers and the history of theory

Reading Polyani's remarks on how the trajectories of working class history differ in Britain from those in the continent, it is hard not to escape the sense that we have to look to the history of relations between the working class and the state for one set of conditions of possibility for the emergence of French theory in the sixties. According to The Great Transformation , those relations were especially different in the UK and in France. In the former the unions and non-political associations produced the labour party, in the latter the political system was able to incorporate working class movement from the very beginning. This is another way of thinking about the 'corporate' nature of the English working class so key to the old Anderson-Nairn thesis. But it matters in relation to the left Leavism that had such an impact on the literary academy right through until 1968, since that movement (especially in Raymond Williams) begins by affirming the ordinary life of the working class and then thinking about ways in which it can, ideologically and ethically, be protected from the culture of consumer capitalism. In France, the state always set itself the task of protecting the people from the ravages of the market and did so in rhetorics and practices of universal rationality which left no room for public working class corporatism, and underpinned the prestige of the philosopher and theorist