On the other hand, the employment of the most advanced quantitative techniques of sociology to establish Marxist and Leninist concepts-and more important, to answer questions posed by these concepts-is unprecedented, at least in the English-speaking world. Perhaps only another historian could appreciate the sheer immensity of research that has gone into the substantiation of Foster’s arguments. The central theme of the book is ‘the development and decline of a revolutionary class consciousness’ in the second quarter of the 19th century its basic aim ‘to further our understanding of how industrial capitalism developed as a whole’.įootnote 2 The result is a rare conjuncture between a consistent application of Marxist categories and the most rigorous and detailed empirical research. If Foster has produced some pathbreaking information about types of family and types of household characteristic of the early industrial working class, this information is strictly subordinated to the political questions it is designed to answer. Little space is allotted to the byways of working-class life or struggle. Questions of power and political organization are moved into the foreground. In place of a detailed literary analysis of the transitional popular ideologies which accompanied the history of the industrial revolution, Foster emphasizes a Leninist dialectic between vanguard and mass. Quantitative analysis of great sophistication is used to support interpretation whenever possible literary evidence, only with the most stringent economy. The questions the book seeks to answer are explicitly Marxist, the categories of analysis equally so. But what is most striking is his abrupt departure from its dominant emphases. John Foster’s book clearly registers a debt to the recent achievement of social history and builds upon it. It has thus been a reaction, not only against a certain form of Marxist history writing, but also against a much older whig-liberal tradition. It has shifted the attention from political vanguards to those whose consciousness traditional historiography would have labelled backward or unenlightened. Compared to traditional labour history, social historians have reacted against the assumption that the history of the working class or of any other oppressed group could be adequately understood through the history of its leadership or its formal organizations, and even more strongly against the short-hand which gauged the ‘maturity’ of a labour movement by tons of steel produced or miles of railway line laid down. Ideas like ‘moral economy’, ‘primitive rebellion’ and general attempts to reconstruct ‘history from below’ have been attempts not only to relate forms of social thought and behaviour to their material roots, but also to uncover the social meaning of lost or disappearing forms of struggle, ritual or myth and to reconstitute their coherence. But it is above all a drawing nearer to social anthropology which has most distinguished modern social history from traditional labour history. The less positivistic realms of sociology have obviously been drawn upon, and economic history of the more traditional kind has always provided a bedrock of support. Moreover, their methods of approach have by no means been inspired solely by Marxist sources. If their guiding lines have been Marxist, they have also drawn much from a native socialist tradition, a tradition which remembered Capital as much for its moral passion as its theoretical achievement. Mainly as a reaction against the positivism dominant within social science, English social historians have tended to disguise sharp analytical distinctions, and eschew sophisticated quantification or explicit theorization. If the best work of English social historians has largely grown within a Marxist tradition, that Marxism has been lightly worn. It represents both a continuation of, and a stark contrast to, the impressive tradition of social history which has grown up in Britain in the last two decades. J ohn Foster’s Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution footnote 1 is a remarkable contribution to English historiography.
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