Marxism and the British Historiographical Tradition

Abstract

When Marx wrote, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will’ (1973; orig. pub. 1852), he posed a whole series of theoretical problems for the historian in the pursuit of his or her discipline. In Italy, Germany, and to a lesser extent in France, generations of intellectuals responded to the challenge by re-defining their relationship with history and attempting to re-think the mechanisms of the historical process. Novel ideas concerning historical materialism, economic determinism, and the historical role of the working class profoundly affected the vision of history and provoked radical reassessment among a large number of European intellectuals. In Britain, despite the attention which both Marx and Engels had devoted to the condition of the English working class (Marx and Engels, 1971; orig. pub. 1844–45), this sea-change in historical thinking went largely unnoticed. The consequences are, at least in part, still with us; only in recent years have there been significant developments in the direction of change. The extent of these developments is perhaps best measured by reference to two quotations.KeywordsHistorical MaterialismMarxist TheoryLiberal TraditionMarxist TraditionBritish TraditionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.