What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.

Product Description: "A remarkable achievement. This ambitious and challenging collection of tightly interwoven essays will find an eager audience among students and faculty in British and imperial history, as well as those interested in liberalism and modernity in other parts of the world...read more

Product Description: The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the “rule of freedom.” As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians...read more

Product Description: With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world...read more

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Product Description: The twelve essays in this volume propose new directions in the analysis of class. John R. Hall argues that recent historical and intellectual developments require reworking basic assumptions about classes and their dynamics. The contributors effectively abandon the notion of a transcendent class struggle...read more

Product Description: In recent years, the concept of class has come under increasing scrutiny, as a means of explaining both the present and the past. The post-industrial class has superseded the manual working class, and new forms of industrial management have broken up more traditional hierarchies and outlooks...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This pioneering and highly original study explores critically the nature of class identity by looking at the formation and influence of two men (Edwin Waugh and John Bright) who are taken as representative of what "working class" and "middle class" meant in England in the nineteenth century...read more

Product Description: This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection of essays addresses the social history of work, and in particular the values and ideas that have accrued around work in the past. The cultural and ideological dimensions of work, aspects neglected in the past, are examined in depth.