Their appeal to the past took different forms in different countries. In France, it took the form of a defense of the corporate organization of crafts, abolished by the revolution of 1789 but illegally revived by artisans seeking to defend themselves against the competitive market in labor. The laws abolishing corporations exemplified liberal ideology in its purest form: "There are no longer corporations in the State; there is no longer anything but the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest. It is permitted to no one to inspire an intermediary interest in citizens, to separate them from the public interest by a spirit of corporation." Faced with an all-out assault on organizations that regulated the price of labor, arranged funerals, and helped out members in hard times, artisans "found the corporate idiom ... entirely appropriate," Sewell explains, "as a framework for organizing practical resistance to the atomistic tendencies of the new system." The "new socialist vision" advanced by workers in 1848 "was founded on a very old sense of craft community."

In England and America, the appeal to earlier forms of solidarity rested less on an explicitly corporate idiom than on the ancient rights of Englishmen, on Saxon resistance to the "Norman yoke," on images of a formerly "merry England," or, in the American case, on the "spirit of '76," the special promise of American life, and the nation's providential mission to abolish inequality. William B. Sylvis, whose National Labor Union of the I860s sought to "strike down the whole system of wages for labor" and thus to "do away with the necessity of trades-unions entirely," invoked the "laws and institutions of our country," which embodied "God's ordained equality of man." Again and again, working-class radicals called up the memory of America's original promise of equal rights and fraternity, only to argue that "this most valued jewel" had been stolen from the people's "crown of sovereignty," in the words of Eugene Debs. "America used to be the land of promise to the poor," observed the Labor Leaf of Detroit in 1885; but "the Golden Age is indeed over—the Age of Iron has taken its place. The iron law of necessity has taken the place of the golden rule."

American workers also appealed to the social conditions believed to have prevailed in the country's earlier history. In the Terre Haute of his youth, Debs said, "the laborer had no concern about his position. The boss depended upon him, and ... the laborer's ambition was to run a little

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