I’ve been racing the clock to finish this Sewell book before it’s due back to the library (curse you, unknown recaller!) but I may break down and buy it. One of Sewell’s goals is to show that the persistence of corporate idioms among the working class after the French revolution does not indicate a backwardness on the part of the class, no kind of vestigial holdover. Rather, the idiom on the workers’ differs on the part of the workers than on the part others, and it is re-articulated by the workers in new contexts.
Eventually this idiom becomes more problematic, though, because of its disjunct with the prevailing political idiom. In order to address the state, the workers turned eventually to an idiom of association, more in keeping with the view after the French revolution which saw society as made up of individuals rather than units of which the individual was a component. If worker organizations were aggregates of individuals - associations - rather than bodies that stood between individuals and the state (corporations, a big problem in the post-revolution), they would have more right to exist in the eyes of the state. (That is, at a minimum, self-assertion in a corporate idiom was increasingly something likely to elicit state repression.)
The worker response was to turn to an idiom of association, the exercise of the right to associate guaranteed and presumed by the post-revolutionary idiom. Just as the state was thought as an association of individual wills, so was the workers’ association, on a smaller level and not in a fashion which aimed (publicly) to mediate between individuals and the state or supplant the state. There were practical organizational components here that I don’t have time to go into, bound up with Fourierism and Saint Simonianism, among other things. These organizations involved attempts to create associations of production.
What struck me reading this was the connection with Marx - communism as free association of producers, and the whole idiom of association in Marx and Engels. I did a bit poking around in the Marxist Dot Org search function and turned up about 500 hits.
How all of this gets refracted in and circulates between Germany, England, France, and elsewhere is beyond me but worth looking into further. The earliest uses of the term I found were in 1840 (by Engels) and 1842 by Marx.
Sewell spends a fair amount of time on this guy Buchez, who I’ve not heard of before. Marx and Engels mention him now and again, someone else to look into. What I find interesting here is the part/whole, individual/group relation implied. Schematically, a corporation implies a common pre-existing interest which is defended against threats. An association implies a uniting together of disparate individuals to form a unity (a general will). In both acting in concert is conditioned (by definition) by a type of power - power to relate to one another and form the organization - and is the condition of a type of power or a greater power (at a minimum, organization as a multiplication or addition of existing power).
I’m also interested in the parallels between the communist project, in Marx and Engels, at least some of the time, and the idiom post-revolutionary France (something I know almost nothing about except what I’ve read in this book). Again schematically, if that revolution was a bourgeois revolution, is there a degree to which Marx and Engels retained some (too much) of that bourgeois quality? At stake is partially the relationship of bourgeois and proletarian revolution, the latter as intensification (and thus a type of continuation) of the former, or a disjunction.
Lastly, if Sewell is right that there’s less of a disjunct between the idiom of the corporation and the idiom of the association then that would imply less of a disjunct between the mid 19th century worker and communist movement and prior movements, which also would imply thus, insofar as the Marxist communist idiom retains any of this idiom of association today, less of disjunct between today and back in the day. Of course, the whole point of the book is the rearticulation of past forms in the present, such that they’re not past forms in a certain sense but very much of the present. That’s fine, I’m not interested in having nothing be different under the sun. But rearticulation is not supercession and doesn’t necessarily entail an epochal narrative of history.