From the end of the 1970s, the marxist approach to history, which had flourished in Britain and elsewhere for over two decades, entered a period of abrupt and terminal decline. Signs of this crisis were visible in many different areas. Politically, the growth of feminism posed questions about experience which could not be explained in class terms. The doubts of feminist critics about the status and content of inherited historical narratives were now reinforced by work in literary theory and history. Similarly, with the growth of dissident protests from Eastern Europe and the advent of the Green movement, Radicals and liberals were increasingly repelled by the marxist dismissal of justice and rights, ecologists were increasingly repelled by the marxist emphasis upon the conquest of nature. At the theoretical level, the failure of Althusser's attempt to re-theorise marxism on the basis of structuralism and psychoanalysis had left marxism in a worse position than he had found it. For his writings had highlighted the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of re-designing a marxist theory which could address current political and social preoccupations in the language of the contemporary human sciences. The alternative, and far more textually scrupulous, attempt by Gerry Cohen to reconstruct a coherent theory of history from Marx's famous 'Preface' to his Critique of Political Economy of 1859 also despite itself dramatised the large, if not unbridgeable gulf which separated the 1970s from the metaphysical assumptions which had shaped Marx's approach in the middle of the nineteenth century. Growing awareness of the starkness of the unresolved philosophical problems faced by marxism was further reinforced by the detailed empirical findings of historians. In the case of nineteenth and twentieth century British labour history, for example, it