Republican Socialism and the Making of the Working Class in Britain, France, and the United States: A Critique of Thompsonian Culturalism

Abstract

After enjoying a dominion in the Western historical tradition that has lasted several decades, at least five in France and perhaps two in the United States, social history is presently under challenge. To the lonely voices of idiosyncratic Marxists who complained that social history ignored the vital questions of power' were added the more substantial chorus of conservative historians and statespeople-one thinks of Mrs. Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand-who adjured historians to return to the history of great events, high politics, and transcendant liberal ideas.2 Annalistes who had proclaimed the death of political history in the early 1980s were publishing conventional histories of the monarchy,3 while historians of the French Revolution abandoned social explanations altogether for political or cultural narratives along the old clerical lines of la faute a Rousseau.4 Social historians themselves were willing to admit that their microcosmic community studies often neglected underlying structures, long-term processes, decisive events, and significant comparisons and