As a European labor historian interested in American labor history, I find Sean Wilentz's essay both informative and stimulating. Wilentz focuses on the issue of class consciousness and looks at the language of protest in Europe and America. He maintains that American labor historians have exaggerated the class conscious ness of European workers while underestimating that of American workers. On this point, I find his arguments plausible and compelling. I am more skeptical about his conclusion that the failure of a socialist party to develop in the United States is not an interesting historical question. Wilentz's description of American radicalism in the period between the Amer ican Revolution and the Civil War suggests a parallel with developments in Western Europe between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in both Europe and and the United States, far-reaching criticisms of large-scale industrial capitalism spread widely among small shopkeep ers, artisans, and industrial workers. This period witnessed a florescence of socialist, trade unionist, feminist, and radical republican ideas among large strata of the population. In Britain Chartism found a wider constituency for radical ideas than did any other mass working-class movement for a century.1 It is possible, as some historians have suggested, that France never again came so near to a revolutionary socialist transformation as it did during the Second Republic between 1848 and 1851.2 The rediscovery of early nineteenth-century popular militancy has led to a reexamination of the ideals that inspired these movements. It is now widely accepted that the harsh working conditions of the industrial revolution and the spread of factory labor cannot alone explain the spread of class consciousness. Work expe rience may well produce frustration and a sense of injustice but the manner of expression of such feelings, whether they are turned internally against other workers or channeled in some political direction, is a consequence of the variety of political alternatives available to workers. In nineteenth-century America the republican tradition, as transformed by its artisans, was one readily available political tradi tion.3 Wilentz's paper is most interesting and intriguing in dealing with the trans