The historiographical trend that goes under the name of the “linguistic turn,” or, more capaciously, the “new cultural history,” has stressed the enormous plasticity and contingency of the human world. Its proponents have maintained that, instead of being determined by laws analogous to those that govern the physical world, human reality is to a large degree—just how large a degree is, of course, a hotly contested issue—autonomously constructed by the human manipulation of language. Language is, in this view, not confined to passively mirroring a prior social reality; rather, linguistically constituted entities can powerfully influence social life even in the absence of “real,” objective referents. As Sarah Maza notes in the introduction to The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850, cultural historians have, since the 1970s, enthusiastically embraced such an approach with respect to newer topics of investigation like gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Yet its application to the venerable historical category of class, while not altogether lacking, has lagged noticeably behind.