Nights of Labor

Nights of Labor (La Nuit des prolétaires: Archives du rêve ouvrier) is a 1981 non-fiction book by Jacques Rancière, based on his doctoral thesis. It gathers paraphrases, quotations and summaries of writings by workers that discuss three experiments in worker association in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

The book looks at the beginnings of today's socialism and at the early class consciousness of the proletariat. Rather than offering a history centred on leaders, Rancière attends to the workers' own voices and their dreams of emancipation.

The book was re-released by Verso in 2012 under the title Proletarian Nights. Labour/Le Travail praised it as "an important statement", and The American Historical Review found the translation excellent and singled out Donald Reid's foreword. Other reviewers described it as more a philosophical meditation than a conventional historical analysis, and noted that its dense mass of evidence makes it a demanding read.