I explore the sources of worker images of society by examining the rival mass movements seeking to recruit worker support across twentieth-century Europe. I here endorse Lockwood’s stress on variety while pursuing the opposite tack to him, of macro-analysis. For Lockwood, images had a micro but apparently not a macro, society-wide life of their own. In decidedly anthropological vein, he argued they derived from the intersection of individuals’ workplace and community relations, since: ‘For the most part men visualize the class structure of their society from the vantage points of their own particular milieux, and their perceptions of the larger society will vary according to their experiences of social inequality in the smaller societies in which they live out their daily lives.’ Distinct working-class images of society derived from different work and community interactions. But he also went on to locate the sources of the three images. That reminder was salutary in the 60s and remains salutary now. footnote ＊ Lockwood was firstly reminding us of the sheer variety of workers’ beliefs, from classconscious proletarians, to conservative status-conscious deferentials, to the calculative, consumption-minded and mixed class-status images of privatized workers. D avid Lockwood’s classic essay ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’ (1966) distinguished three ideal-typical images of society found among workers: proletarian, deferential and privatized.
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