This innovative study of working-class formation in Philadelphia challenges a number of widely held views about the Origins and nature of the early American working class. In the prevailing interpretation, the birth of the American working class took place in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and traced its ideological roots to the republicanism of the Revolutionary and Jacksonian eras. In contrast to this view, Schultz argues that the origins of Philadelphia's working class lay in the dramatic social changes that transformed artisan life in eighteenth-century Philadelphia and argues as well that the city's working-class movement drew its ideological force from an indigenous small-producer tradition inherited from the artisans of early modern England. In addition, Schultz takes issue with the prevailing view that religion and party politics diminished working-class consciousness.

Rather, he details the ways in which rational religion and popular politics were an active force in the formation of Philadelphia's early working class. Engagingly written and drawing upon a wide range of sources, The Republic of Labor reconstructs the moral and political worlds of Philadelphia artisans as they created America's first working class from the crucible of economic, political, and social change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.