ABSTRACT
Scholars have charted Mikhail Bakhtin’s intellectual journey from a youthful engagement with Marx to a rejection of the class struggle and the embracing of a mystical Christianity. This may or may not be an accurate description of his development. One possible solution has been offered by Marc W. Steinberg who argues that Bakhtin’s theory of language should be used to complement E. P. Thompson’s class analysis of the English working class in the early nineteenth century. Steinberg starts by reminding us that Thompson did not ignore language as a mediator between class and consciousness. Every word is contested and this is even more so, Volosinov would argue, in the exercise of class power and resistance. The arguments that social classes expressed in nineteenth-century England over the meaning of ‘rights’, sometimes with the same words being utilised, and sometimes in a modified fashion.
