Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

Ranciere's classic essays from the 1970s, as he was developing his distinctive method.

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Ranciere has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of “heretical” knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Révoltes Logiques, Ranciere wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Ranciere characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such “rude words” as “people,” “factory,” “proletarians” and “revolution” still need to be spoken.