ABSTRACT
The modern-minded worker, coming of age in the industrial era and faced with brutal attacks on his/her new-found sense of personal dignity, wrestled with the question of whether to be loyal to the system of industrial capitalism or to rebel against it. The central task of this essay is to sort out the origins of loyalism from the origins of rebellion, and to assess the relative historical impact of both. Industrial morality bore a certain resemblance to an earlier set of virtues. It is clear that industry, frugality, and temperance had preindustrial origins, and that an ethic of competitive individualism had put in an appearance among eighteenth-century laboring classes. Industrial morality was a source of cleavage within the working class between “traditional” and “modern” values. The economic changes of the industrial revolution intensified competition among wage earners, cheapened their skills, undercut their security, attacked their standard of living, increased their dependency, and lowered their social position.
