This dissertation explores the formation of the modern historiography of class in mid-nineteenth century Sweden by analyzing constitutive rhetoric of class in the Stockholm press from 1848 to 1851. The aim is to study how disparaged workers during the February Revolution in France began to be ascribed a new kind of unified agency, and how workers in Stockholm became recipients of mobilizing appeals from all parts of the political spectrum. To this end the dissertation examines periodical papers representing the three major political positions of the period, i.e. a royalist conservative press, liberal papers in opposition, and a newly emerging socialist press. How were workers described, invoked and addressed as a new kind of community of political interest and action in these publications?

Refuting perspectives of socio-economic determinism, this study adopts a conception of belonging and agency that views political communities as discursively produced by the creation of subject positions and the interpellation of individuals to them. The study is also influenced by recent re-evaluations of the category of the event associated with poststructuralism, and analyzes operations of constitutive rhetoric in forming a new symbolic field of class identity and agency in an open-ended and multivalent historical situation.

The analysis shows how workers were construed as political agents in the Stockholm press during the mid-nineteenth century turmoil by being described, invoked and addressed within the framework of four main rival narratives. The socialist press tried to evoke a self-organizing working class within a collectivist narrative of labour’s liberation and universal male suffrage. The liberal press interpellated workers to a position aligned with the reformist middle class within a narrative of individual self-determination and gradual improvement. The royalist narrative of reconciliation was aimed at separating the large mass of workers from socialist and communist ideologues, deemed as mischievous outsiders, while at the same time offering them a new-found and prominent role as protectors of social harmony and peace. Only within the royalist narrative of catastrophe were the workers continuously excluded from mobilizing appeals, instead being invoked as the harbingers of an approaching communist revolution, against which all other sections of society should unite.