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Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language
Author(s): David Mayfield and Susan Thorne

Source: Social History, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 165-188
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David Mayfield and Susan Thorne
Social history and its discontents:

Gareth Stedman Jones and the
po itiCs of anguage
Powerful revisionist currents are now flowing through the social sciences against what
have been termed 'society-centred' modes of explanation. Emerging out of a variety of
intellectual traditions, the revisionism by no means makes up a unified stream. But it is
interesting that in spite of their disparateorigins, each current represents itself in the form
of a restoration; the 'new institutionalism', the new project to 'bring the state back in', the
new history and sociology of law and, most prominently, the recent 'linguistic turn', all
claim to be restoring 'politics' to its proper explanatory role in the analysis of human
affairs.'
These revisionist currents appear to signal a paradigmatic shift in academic discourse
itself. Culture, language, institutions, the state or politics more generally have been
elevated to the central position in revisionist explanatory models, significantly undermin-
ing the authority of 'the social' or 'society' as the privileged, objective ground of social
* We would like to thank the Center for the to the state and to the law. The literature
Comparative Study of Social Transformations involved in each of these projects is already
at the Univesity of Michigan for financial enormous and not all of it mutually compatible,
support while we were writing this paper. We but for examples of the 'new Institutionalism'
would also like to thank Sue Juster, Tim and the related project to 'bring the state back
Schrand, Geoff Eley and especially Becky Reed in', see the excellent work of Jonathan Zeitlin,
for their help and encouragement. for example: 'Shop floor bargaining and the
'.The 'linguistic turn' has pride of place state: a contradictory relationship' in S. Tolli-
among the other currents, for it is possible to day and J. Zeitlin (eds), Shop Floor Bargaining
argue 'that the various socio-economic reduc- and the State: Historical and Comparative
tionisms were in fact modelled upon a pre- Perspectives (I984); and Charles Sabel and
critical linguistics which viewed language as the JonathanZeitlin, 'Historical alternativesto mass
secondary, symbolic representation, reflection, production: politics, markets and technology in
paraphrase, etc. of a primary reality. For a nineteenth-century industrialization', Past and
superb introduction to recent literary theory in Present, cviii (August I985), 133-76. Theda
which the most important theoretical reflection Skocpol's has been a very influential voice
on language has taken place, see Terry Eagleton, among critics of both Marxist and liberal
Literary Theory:An Introduction (i 983) . just as methods, charged with reducing the state to a
the 'linguistic turn' seeks to give some measure mere representation of an underlying socio-
of autonomy and constitutive authority to economic essence. See Skocpol's 'Bringing the
language, so the other revisionist currents seek state back in: strategies of analysis in the current
to give autonomy and authority to institutions, research'in P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T.

i66 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
scientific explanation. And this 'dissolution of the social'2presages, it is thought, nothing

less than the dissolution of the dominant modes of interpretation, both liberal and
Marxist, which have informed social analysis for most of this century and much of the last.
Within the historical profession, this older tradition of 'society-centred' analysis had
itself emerged as a paradigmatic revision of sorts. It developed in opposition to
historiographical conventions which equated historical significance with formal political
change effected through the intentional acts of elites. When we consider that this original
historiography narratedinstitutional histories, histories of sovereign states, legal histories
and intellectual histories, then the new revisionism appears very much like a restoration.
The question which arises is whether the long diversion through a tradition predicatedon
social rather than political determination made any difference. Is social science
experiencing something akinto an Hegelian revolution, generating synthetic insights from
both the political-institutional approach and the sociological approaches? Or have we
Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cam- Ungovernable People: The English and Their
bridge, I985), 6-37; and 'Political response to Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-
capitalist crisis: neo-Marxist theories of the state turies (I980). Both are formulatedas critiques of
and the case of the New Deal', Politics and earlier histories which tended to reduce the law
Society, xix (I980), 155-201. See also Michael to the status of an expression of socio-economic
Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vol. i: A determinations or to the status of a tool wielded
History of Powerfrom the Beginning to ADr 760 by the dominant social class. From the neo-
(Cambridge, I986) for a comparable critique of Marxist traditions of Gramscian and Althusser-
'society-centred' explanations of power. The ian interpretation see the excellent and import-
return to institutional and 'state-centred' ap- ant early essay by Geoff Eley and Keith Nield,
proaches is also evident in the revival of interest 'Why does social history ignore politics?', Social
in Karl Polanyi's work. See his The Great History, v (I980), 249-72; and Bob Jessop, The
Transformation: The Political and Economic Capitalist State: Marxist Theoriesand Methods
Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1957) and its (New York, I 982). For an exemplarytheoretical
compelling critique of socio-economic reduc- work on the linguistic or discursive approach to
tionism. See also Fred Block and Margaret R. politics (which in fact comes out of an earlier
Somers, 'Beyond the economistic fallacy: the engagement with Althusser and Gramsci), see
holistic science of Karl Polanyi' in T. Skocpol Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony
(ed.), Visionand Method in Historical Sociology and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
(Cambridge, I984), 47-84. See Charles Tilly, Democratic Politics (I985). And finally, the
Big Structures, Large Processes, and Huge 'linguistic turn' has benefited from the critical
Comparisons(New York, I984) for a critique of engagement of feminist scholars in the fields of
the reification of 'society' into the ontological literary theory and history (Judith Newton,
ground of social science explanation, and see 'Family Fortunes: "New History" and "New
Tilly's earlier work which anticipates some of Historicism"', Radical History Review, XLIII
the recent discussion concerning the state as an (I989), 6-7). For introductions to the feminist
autonomous actor, for example, 'Reflections on deployment of post-structuralist theory in liter-
the history of European state-making'in C. Tilly ary studies and in history, see Toril Moi,
(ed.), The Formation of National States in SexuallTextual Politics. F'eminist Literary
Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), 3-83. Two Theory (New York, I985); and Joan Wallach
excellent examples of the new history of the law Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New
in British history are Joanna Innes and John York, I988).
Styles, 'The crime wave: recent writing on 2 The term is from Scott Lash and John Urry,
crime and criminal justice in eighteenth century 'The dissolution of the social?' in Mark Wardell
England', Journal of British Studies, xxv and Stephen Turner (eds), Sociological Theory
(I986), 38o-435, and the introductory piece in in Transition (I986), 95-I09.
John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An

May 1992 Social history and its discontents I67
simply come full circle, returning to the point of departure after a long and fruitless detour
away from 'the political'?
Few, if any of the participantsin these new revisionist currents would claim to be merely
reinstating a history of the high politics of a narrow spectrum of elites. But over the past
decade, the call to repoliticize social science has moved from a position fully sympathetic to
contributions made within the sociological frameworkto a position actively dismissive of
social analysis itself. Within the historical profession, for example, the revisionist
problematic is shifting from 'why does social history ignore politics?' to 'why should
historians interested in politics look at society'?3 And the answer to the latter question
seems increasingly and polemically to be that they need not.
This shift from sympathy to antipathy for the sociological approach is clearly inscribed
in the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, one of the most important historians of the
nineteenth-century English working class. Stedman Jones's early work was formulated
quite self-consciously from the point of view of a social historian, while his more recent
work has made up one of the most forceful and influential statements of the new
revisionism.4 His article 'Rethinking Chartism', published in I983 in the significantly
titled collection of essays, Languages of Class, announced Stedman Jones's shift away
from a sociological methodology which viewed class as an ontologically given reality in
favour of a 'linguistic' approach which treats class as a discursive construction. This
methodological manoeuvre informs Stedman Jones's empirical ambition to move
discussions of Chartism away from questions about the primarily working-class social
location of its supporters in order to bring the 'politics' of Chartism 'to the fore'. He argues
that the analysis of Chartism must be freed from 'a priori assumptions . . . about its social
meaning', which he proposes to accomplish through the application of a 'non-referential
conception of language to the study of Chartist speeches and writings'.5 Stedman Jones's
3This shift from sympathy to antipathy for effort with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
the sociological approach can be detected Socialist Strategy. The quote is borrowed from
conceptually, for instance, in the shift from Eley and Nield, 'Why does social history ignore
notions of the relative autonomy of the state politics?', op. cit., which was formulated in a
(associated with Althusser's original formu- manner quite sympathetic to the contributions
lations) to recent considerations of the state as a of social history.
fully autonomous, self-determining actor. For 4 Stedman Jones outlines his intellectual
discussions favourable to this shift see the trajectory in his introduction to a collection of
aforementioned work of Skocpol; and see Fred his essays, Languages of Class: Studies in
Block, 'Beyond relative autonomy' in F. Block, English Working Class History 1832-I 982 (New
Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and York, I983). Of these, 'Working-class culture
Postindustrialism (Philadelphia, I987) 8i-98. and working-class politics in London, I870-
This shift might also be measured biographi- I900: notes on the remaking of a working class',
cally, for instance, in the careers of scholars 179-238 (originally published in the yournal of
whose early work was framed self-consciously by Social History, VII, 4 (Summer I974) typifies
the sociological method and whose later work, the social historical approachto popular politics,
often in the mode of a self-critique, took critical while 'Rethinking Chartism', 90-178, presents
aim at that method (e.g. Joan Scott). An Stedman Jones's critique of this approach as it
exemplary figure whose work is extremely has been applied in the historiography on
challenging in both its old sociological guise and Chartism.
its more recent post-sociological guise, is 5 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op. cit.,
Ernesto Laclau. Contrast Politics and Ideology 21.
in Marxist Theory(I977) to his collaborative

i68 Social History VOL. I7: NO. 2
argument, however, goes further in its import than simply redressing an imbalance in
historians' discussion of the political versus the social context of Chartism. His
methodological contention of the political determination (he calls it 'prefiguring') of
interest and political identity calls into serious question the very relevance of 'social
context' to the analysis of political movements and historical change.
The shift away from social determination has centred on the problem of political
motivation. While social historical convention has long been predicated on the location of
political allegiance in contexts of socially 'given' interest, the revisionist project questions
the material referent of political motivation altogether. As Stedman Jones puts it in his
introduction to Languages of Class: 'We cannot . . . decode political language to reach a
primal and material expression of interest. . . . We must therefore . . . study the
production of interest, identification, grievance and aspiration within political languages
themselves.'6 The prominence of formal political language in this framework seems to
afford little space for traditional social historical concerns, such as the formation of social
hierarchies or changing economic practices - particularlywhere these do not find explicit
articulation in the dominant 'political' discourses of the period under study. It is
formulations such as these (which recur throughout Stedman Jones's recent work) that
induce more than a little apprehension for the future of the social historical project itself.
Stedman Jones, like others across the revisionist scene, understands his renunciationof
social analysis as a necessary means to the greaterend of rescuing the explanatorypower of
politics from the dreadedspectre of socio-economic reductionism. While sympathetic with
the recently renewed commitment to political analysis, however, we feel that the
revisionist project itself betrays reductionist tendencies as subversive of 'the political' as
the social historical methodology it seeks to displace. We do not wish to suggest that the old
'new social history' was beyond reproach, nor that it was innocent of reductionist sins.
Rather, we believe that the recent revisionist critique has missed its critical mark, in ways
which have undermined its own politicizing agenda.
We hope to suggest generally both where the new revisionism goes wrong and how its
critique of social reductionism might be righted by way of a critical reading of Gareth
Stedman Jones's work within each paradigm (that is to say, the social versus the linguistic
approachto popular politics). It is certainly a credit to Stedman Jones that his scholarship
has consistently provided a forum for getting at some of the more difficult conceptual
issues at the heart of contemporary debate in social science. Stedman Jones's work, both
early and late, has consisted of the most timely interventions into the historiographical
scene, bringing to it an uncommon acuity and theoretical sophistication. This was
certainly the case both with the early and later work collected in Languages of Class. His
1974 review of John Foster's Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. Early
Industn'al Capitalism in Three English Towns ( 974) was a theoretical tour de force, and
remains one of the most extraordinaryreviews of a single book ever written. And his 1977
article, 'Class expression versus social control? A critique of recent trends in the social
history of leisure' brought a largely untheorized body of literature into impressive
theoretical focus, providing one of the most persuasivecritiques of scholarly invocations of
social control. The two articles on which we focus here, 'Working-class culture and
6
ibid., 22, 24.

working-class politics in London, I870-1900: notes on the remaking of a working class'

(I974) and 'Rethinking Chartism' (I983) have each constituted a paradigm-setting
intervention in the history of the nineteenth-century English working class. The
'Working-classculture' article filled in the explanatory contours of that 'life apart'central
to historiographical representations of the 'traditional' urban working class of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 'Rethinking Chartism' similarly promises to
focus historiographical questions about popular politics during the early nineteenth
century on the problematic of radicalismand its associated political discourses.8
More to the concerns of this article, 'Rethinking Chartism' has sparked important and
long-delayed debates within British history concerning the salience of 'class analysis' in
particular, and the relationship between politics and society more generally. Our concern
here is less with the empirical force of Stedman Jones's understanding of Chartism in this
latter piece, which has been debated elsewhere,9 than with the conceptualization of
politics, language and society which informs his critique of social historical practice. It is
really the general contours of Stedman Jones's transfer of autonomous, authoritative
status from society to politics (or rather the language of politics), a transfer shared by
much of the revisionist scene, rather than the substance of particular scholarship, which
draws our critical fire.'0 What we would like to suggest is that this transferof autonomy and
causal authority to political language, far from reconvening attention on the fundamental
problem of politics, serves, in fact, quite subtly to suppress it once again.
THE OLD 'NEW SOCIAL HISTORY'

The 'new social history' informing the early work of Stedman Jones first won academic
acceptance in the mid-Ig6os. Formed in the anti-fascist struggles of the I930S, and
encouraged by the liberationist movements which transformed political culture in Britain
and America after the Second World War, an increasingly numerous and influential body
of historians struggled to theorize political practice in ways that encompassed mass
movements, ways that could allow for an actively participatory vision of politics.
Historiographicalattention shifted accordingly, not just in favour of what were perceived
to be the past equivalents of contemporary radicalisms (such as Levellers and Chartists,
populists and suffragettes) but also to questions about the social contexts of popular
7 See, for example, Standish Meacham, A Life Neville Kirk, 'In defence of class. A critique of
Apart. The English Working Class i890-1914 recent revisionist writing upon the nineteenth-
(Cambridge, 1977). century English working class', International
8 For suggestive allusions as to the importance Review of Social History, xxxii ( 987), 2-47.
of the rediscovery of radicalism in the wake of 10This conceptualization is symptomatic, we
'Rethinking Chartism', see Carolyn Kay Steed- believe, of the rising antipathy to 'social'
man, Landscape for a Good Woman. A Story of explanation across the revisionist spectrum. The
Two Lives (New Brunswick, I986); and Patrick transfer of autonomous, authoritative status
Joyce, Visionsof the People. Industrial E'ngland from 'society' to 'language' in his work finds
and the Question of Class, 1840-1914 (Cam- more or less precise analogues in the transfer of
bridge, 1991). autonomy and authority from 'society' to 'the
9 See especially Robert Gray, 'The decon- state' in the work of Skocpol, Katznelson and
structing of the English working class', Social Tilly, and from 'society' to 'institutions' in the
History, II, 3 (October I986), 363-73; and work of Zeitlin and Sabel.

I170 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
political mobilization as opposed to the calculations of elites." 'Class' functioned as the

primaryconceptual vehicle whereby political mobilization was systematically linked to the
social production of 'interest'.
In practice, integrating social and political narrativesproved exceptionally difficult. So
long as the focus of attention remained on 'heroic' popular struggles, the 'new social
history' at its best suggested the socially structured imperatives for political actions which
remained off the analyticalstage. In this regard, even E. P. Thompson's TheMaking of the
English WorkingClass set the social stage of material deprivation and cultural solidarity
which made Chartism possible rather than analysing the contingent processes whereby
Chartists mobilized and sustained their popular base of support.'2 At its worst, the 'new
social history' read politics from social structure, when representing political identifi-
cations as the unproblematic expression of socio-economic 'interests'. When popular
politics did not coincide with the interests which historians attributed to the social
locations of the industrial working class - as in instances of working-class nationalism,
racism, imperialism and other forms of popular conservatism - then notions of false
consciousness were more or less explicitly invoked; more commonly, conservative popular
politics were simply ignored. 13
The mid-1970s witnessed a rebellion within the ranks of a younger generation of social
historians (of whom Gareth Stedman Jones was one) precisely over this tendency to evade
the problem of popular conservatism. In the increasingly dreary political climate of the
1970s, the undeniably popular appeal of contemporary conservatisms culminating in
Thatcherism and Reaganism made it less and less plausible (and certainly less politically
astute) to ignore historically effective conservative political formations as aberrantforms
of false consciousness. This second generation of social historians set out, therefore, to
take popular conservatism seriously, to accept and explain from within a sociological
framework why the British working class had not generated a revolutionary socialist
agenda.14
The literature produced by this younger group of historians formed the first sustained
critique of the tendency within the old 'new social history' to ignore, deny or evade the
importance of politics. Strangely enough, however, the strategy for rescuing popular
politics from condescending presumptions of false consciousness was effectively to deny
the specifically political nature of those popular political identificationswhich could not be
" This reconceptualization of politics in Critical Perspectives (Oxford, I990).

favour of popular mobilization was manifested 13 Eric Hobsbawm's 'The labour aristocracy'
in attempts to move beyond narrowlyconceived (in Labouring Men) represents a rare acknow-
institutional histories of the labour movement in ledgement that the political identifications of
favour of political histories of the working class, large or at least influential sectors of the British
of which the work of E. P. Thompson and Eric working class had been significantly affected by
Hobsbawm stands out most notably. See their imperialism.
respective classics: The Making of the English 14 See, for example, Robert Q. Gray, The
WorkingClass (New York, I963) and Labouring Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh
Men (I964)- (Oxford, 1976); Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan
12 For a recent critical appreciation of E'lite in Victorian Society (1978); Gareth
Thompson's continued prowess in the field of Stedman Jones, 'Working-classculture'; see also
English social history and beyond, see the the interesting exchange between Alistair Reid
excellent collection of essays edited by Harvey J. and H. F. Moorhouse published in Social
Kaye and Keith McClelland, E. P. Thompson: History from January I978-October 1979.

May 1992 Social history and its discontents 171
reconciled with socialist or quasi-socialist aspirations. The popular appeal of liberalism,

patriotism and imperialism among significant sectors of the working class during the late
Victorian period was all too frequently explained away by these younger social historians
as a rational response to objective, non-political, social conditions, rather than represent-
ing any genuine attachment on the part of popular audiences to the particular political
ideologies in question. More often than not, then, this literature, which proposed to take
popular politics more seriously, paradoxically ended up collapsing it back into social
determinations.
Symptomatic of the fate of the political in such studies is Stedman Jones's analysis of
popular conservatism in his I974 article 'Working-classculture and working-class politics
in London, I870-1900: notes on the remakingof a workingclass'. Against'standard
interpretations'of the period as dominated by the 'rise of Labour', Stedman Jones begins
by acknowledging that the majority of workers were not socialists. Citing contemporary
observers across the political spectrum, Stedman Jones insists that the real problematic for
the social history of the period should be the absence of 'class war' or a combative class
politics. Contemporariesattributed the failure of revolutionarysocialism to materialize as
expected to a 'wave of imperialism'which swept Great Britain during the closing decades
of the nineteenth century. Populareuphoria at the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War,
former republicans' obeisance to the monarchy, the popularity of jingo entertainments in
the music halls over socialist lecterns were all understood as manifestations of an imperial
turn to popular political aspirations which dashed socialist hopes as it propelled the
Conservative party to electoral victory.'5
While conceding that the late Victorian working class was not interested in socialism,
Stedman Jones's agenda in this article is to deny the implications of ideological
incorporationwhich he apparentlyassociated with notions of popular imperialism. Rather
than representing socialism'spolitical defeat in an age of empire, Stedman Jones argues
that conservatism's 'popularity'was but a symptom of a depoliticization of working-class
culture after the defeat of the Charter: 'What Mafeking and other imperial celebrations
portended was not so much the predominance of the wrong politics among the mass of
London workers, but rathertheir estrangement from polical activity as such.' 'Loyalism',
in short, 'was a product of apathy.'16
Here, the early Stedman Jones (writing as a social historian) does not differ
fundamentally from predecessors who either ignored such political formations or
attributed them to false consciousness. He, like they, assumes that conservative politics
are in fundamental conflict with popular 'interests'. Popular identification with such
politics could, therefore, only come into existence as a result of bourgeois manipulation. In
an effort to avoid recourse to the imputation of false consciousness, Stedman Jones instead
contests the notion that the late Victorian working class was genuinely conservative at all,
an argument he supports primarily by discounting the ideological influence of middle-
class emissaries and their values in the working-classcommunity. 'The results of fifty years
of Christian missionary activity', for example, 'had been insignificant.' Church atten-
dance, like voting Conservative, 'was generally for material reasons'. Temperance made
16
5 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op. ibid., 182.
cit., especially 179-80.

172 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
few inroads, while workersdeployed the fruits of what thrift they managed'to demonstrate
self-respect' in the form of elaborate funerals and Sunday best suits, rather than in
accordance with bourgeois calculations of utility."7 The seduction of working-class
loyalties by a conservative and what is presumed to be a bourgeois politics is thus
dismissed. In its place, Stedman Jones argues that the dominant characteristic of
working-classconsciousness in this period was a widespread apathy with regardto political
matters, an apathy incapable of generating a socialist will to power and superficially
vulnerable (as opposed to genuinely attracted) to the romantic enticements of Empire,
Crown and Toryism.
It is at just this point in his argumentthat Stedman Jones sacrificespopularpolitics to its
social context, and it is quite interesting that the price of social reductionism is most
obvious where the politics under study are most unsavoury.'8 Popular conservatism in all
its manifestations was not, we discover, 'really'conservative, in the sense of involving the
mobilization of working-class support for conservative political principles. On the
contrary, fatalism was the dominant theme in working-class culture at large, which
Stedman Jones attributes to the high unemployment levels characteristicof working-class
experience in London. And it is, in turn, this fatalism which functions in Stedman Jones's
argument to exonerate the late Victorian working class of 'genuine' attachment to the
conservative principles by which it was periodically mobilized.
In place of the active appropriationof conservative identifications, then, Stedman Jones
posits a structurally determined deformation in working-classculture, a concession to the
power of advanced industrial capitalism and the mind-numbing effects of poverty.
Stedman Jones approvingly cites Mayhew's assessment of the political potential, or lack
thereof, endemic to the material deprivations characteristicof working-classexperience:
Where the means of sustenance and comfort are fixed, the human being becomes
conscious of what he has to depend upon. If, however, his means be uncertain -
abundant at one time, and deficient at another - a spirit of speculation or gambling
with the future will be induced, and the individual gets to believe in 'luck'and 'fate'as
the arbiters of his happiness rather than to look upon himself as 'the architect of his
fortunes'- trusting to 'chance'ratherthan his own powers and foresight to relieve him
at the hour of necessity. 19
There are references throughout the article to the 'local and material' character of
working-class concerns; explicit support for larger political issues, such as imperialism, is
interpreted as 'passive acquiescence'; politics in general is referred to as too 'abstractand
remote' to interest the typical working man; in short the social conditions of working-class
existence during the second half of the nineteenth century had so shrunk the imaginative
capacity of working people, so compressed their 'horizons of possibility' as to preclude
political ambitions altogether.20In place of political action, there emerged a 'culture of
I' ibid., I96-200. Missionary Society, 1705-1925' (Ph.D. disser-

'8 This point is developed in a broader tation, University of Michigan, I990), 20-30.
historiographical context in Susan Thorne, " Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op.
'ProtestantEthics and the Spirit of Imperialism: cit., 234-
British Congregationalists and the London 20 ibid., 180-i, I96, 202, 214-15.

consolation' epitomized by the music hall, and eventually a labourist politics bent on
welfare not power.21
All of which is to suggest that the early Stedman Jones exonerated the British working
class of conservatism at the expense of the capacities of working peole to think and act with
political purpose. The sociological frameworkwhich informed his analysis is salvaged by
sacrificing the genuine piety of popular attachments to Empire, Crown, religion and
respectability. For while working-class interests might dictate an apathetic withdrawal
from political aspirations, the only positive political loyalties they might generate, so it
would seem, would be socialist. The converse, of course, is the conventional socialist
adage: that non-socialist politics do not represent the socially given 'interests' of working
people, and are therefore misguided if not 'false' responses to social experience.
THE LINGUISTIC TURN

In the decade between writing 'Working-class culture and working-class politics' and
'Rethinking Chartism', Stedman Jones's theoretical framework underwent a striking
reversal. Perhaps as a result of Mrs Thatcher's seemingly impregnable hold on popular
support, Stedman Jones has come to accept, circa I983, the authenticity of other-than-
socialist political attachments of popular constituencies.z2 Properly frustrated by socio-
logical imperatives which voided popular conservatisms of their political content in the
earlier article, the Stedman Jones of 'Rethinking Chartism'now insists that the analysis of
political movements must focus on the formal content of political discourse.23
Rather than challenging the older sociological interpretation of popular conservatism,
Stedman Jones commendably takes on one of the most 'heroic' and radical political
movements in the history of the British working class - the Chartistcampaign for universal
suffrage during the I83os and I840s. Chartism was both politically militant and strikingly
homogeneous in social terms - a combination which has facilitated its interpretation as an
(albeit immature) stage in the working class's political evolution towards socialism.
According to Stedman Jones, however, the social interpretation of Chartism has
systematically obscured the specifically political - as opposed to social - nature of the
demand for the Charter.
2z ibid., 237-8. It was by way of this 'The deconstructing of the English working
formulation that Richard Price exonerates the class', op. cit., 363; Kirk, 'In defence of class',
British working class of imperial guilt; see An op. cit., 3.
Imperial War and the British Working Class Z3 'In contrast to the prevalent social-histori-
(1972). cal approach to Chartism, whose starting point

2' At the root of Stedman Jones's disillusion is some conception of class or occupational
with the sociological framework surely lies the consciousness, it ['Rethinking Chartism'] ar-
consolidation of Mrs Thatcher's hold on popular gues that the ideology of Chartism cannot be
support in Britain and the failure of Labour constructed in abstraction from its linguistic
adequately to contest her appeal, taken on board form. An analysis of Chartist ideology must start
theoreticallyas indicative of the power of politics from what Chartists actually said or wrote, the
and the fragility of social experience in the terms in which they addressed each other or
formation of popular political consciousness. their opponents.' (Stedman Jones, Languages of
For reference to the impact of Thatcherism on Class, op. cit., 94.)
historiographicaldebates about class, see Gray,

174 Social History VOL. 17: NO. Z
Notwithstanding its coincidence with the socio-economic 'events' of the Industrial

Revolution and the making of the English working class, Chartism, according to Stedman
Jones, was above all else about political power. Its language was 'first and foremost a
vocabularyof political exclusion whatever the social characterof those excluded'. As such,
it 'could never be the ideology of a specific class'.24That most Chartists were workers had
more to do with the inclusion of the middle classes in the political nation in I832 - a
political moment - than with the socio-economic processes of class formation. The middle
classes were rarely, if ever, criticized for their economic privileges but rather for their
immoral and selfish use of political power to obstruct the 'fair reward of labour', whereas
factory owners who supported the Charter were revered. The crucial distinction drawn
within Chartism, then, was 'not between the ruling and exploited classes in the economic
sense but between the beneficiaries and the victims of political corruption and monopoly
political power'.25The solution to this manifestly political problem was the extension of
the franchise to 'the people'.
That Chartism couched neither the problem nor its solution in terms of the social
relations of production suggests to Stedman Jones that the social situation of Chartist
constituencies was, in fact, of little relevance for understanding their political attach-
ments. Stedman Jones demonstrates the insignificance of 'the social' to political
subjectivity by showing that the Chartist vocabularyof political exclusion and corruption
long pre-dated the major social transformationof the period, the 'making of the English
working class' during the first half of the nineteenth century. Chartism evolved out of
radicaldiscursive traditions dating back to the seventeenth century, traditions which were
temporally prior to the socio-economic changes associatedwith industrialization.And this
temporal priority undermines the 'axiomatic presumption of social historians that
economic power is the cause and political power the effect'. Chartism cannot, therefore,
have been the political response to economic and social developments which occurred in its
discursive wake.26
In fact, it is this temporal priority of radicaldiscourse which persuades Stedman Jones
of the logical and causal priority of language itself in relation to the political identifications
it articulates. Language 'prefigures'and 'creates' subjective needs and demands which it
then 'orchestrates'.27It is a short step from this to the recurring suggestion that there is
really little need, therefore, to refer the political ideas of Chartists to the social contexts in
which Chartism won popular support. On the contrary, it is implied, political loyalties are
24 these intellectual traditions are made to speak:

ibid., 104.
25 ibid., I69. 'The same aspirations, fears and tensions are
26 One wonders exactly where this foil comes there: but they arise in a new context, with new
from. After all, Thompson himself eloquently language and arguments, and a changed balance
depicts much of the same intellectual heritage in of forces. We have to try to understand both
The Making of the English Working Class. things - the continuing traditions and the
Thompson too notes the intellectual continuity context that has changed' (24). Still, this is a far
across popular and reform movements from the cry from depicting political ideology as the
seventeenth century through the nineteenth, unmediated product of social circumstance.
but adds the sensible qualificationthat one must 27 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op.
also acknowledge the change in context in which cit., 2I, 24, 105.

produced within the circle of language, and formal political language at that,28 quite
independently of social circumstance. As Stedman Jones puts it, to understand Chartism,
one need merely read Chartist texts from the point of view of a'non-referential conception
of language, exploring the systematic relationships between the terms and propositions
within the language rather than setting particular propositions into direct relation to a
putative experiential reality of which they are assumed to be the expression'.29
The later Stedman Jones thereby rescues the content of Chartist politics from social
reductionism by representingthe language of Chartism as the virtually autonomous source
of subjective political identity. To his credit, he has effectively freed discussions of
popular politics from a narrow materialism which could not account for the historical
purchase of non-socialist popular politics. On the other hand, the radical divorce of
political movements from the social circumstances of their supporters which is implicit in
Stedman Jones's non-referential linguistics carries its own dangers. In brief, the
methodology deployed in Stedman Jones's analysis of Chartism reduces popular political
identifications to the textual vocabularies through which they are articulated, thereby
collapsing individual subjectivity into particularpolitical practices. It becomes difficult to
imagine within this framework how or why individuals transfer their political loyalties,
how or why particular vocabularies get contested, indeed how or why historical change
occurs at all. It is in this way that Stedman Jones's substitution of a linguistic determinism
for sociological reductionism is equally fatal for conceptualizing politics in such a way that
even a conditioned agency, much less historical change can be imagined.30
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

In short, whatever else it may have accomplished, the historiographical journey from
social history through its recent revisionist critique has not realized its agenda to restore
'the political' to the centre stage of historical analysis. On the contrary, political behaviour
or belief is equally if not more determined in 'Rethinking Chartism' than it was in
'Working-classculture'. The analogous reduction of politics in both articles to the (albeit
diametrically opposed) determining grounds of 'society' and 'language' is rooted, we will
's Those who embrace the 'linguistic turn' form of state power (and therefore of power
have also expressed reservations about Stedman generally speaking) in the nineteenth century,
Jones's use of language. See Joan Wallach Scott, i.e. the emergence of a centralized state
'On language, gender, and working-class his- intervening with unprecedented force in the
tory' in her Gender and the Politics of History treatment of general problems of 'social order',
(New York, I988), especially 54-9 (originally and in order to secure the 'autonomous oper-
published in International Labor and Working ation of the laws of the competitive system'
Class History, xxxi (I987), 1-13); see also (176); and the changing relationship of the state
Gray, 'The deconstruction of the English toward the 'public', particularly as it began to
working class', op. cit., 367-8. take on a more 'representative' posture under
29 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op. Peel in the I840s. Stedman Jones's theoretical
cit., 2 I. assumptions about language'sprefigurativenon-
30 We do not in the least feel that our criticisms referentialstatus can be dissociated from (and in
vitiate the importance of 'Rethinking Chartism'. some ways contradict) his crucial argument that
We do feel, however, that its real insights have Chartism can only be understood in reference to
little to do with its conception of language, and this context of changing state power.
more to do with its portrayal of the changing

176 Social History VOL. 17 NO. 2
argue, in significant elements of continuity between the two frameworks,notwithstanding

revisionist pretensions to the contrary. In fact, it is precisely where the revisionist claim to
originality is strongest - namely the dramaticrejectionof 'class'as an organizingconcept -
that its framework most betrays some of the more problematic legacies of the social
historical methodology. Furthermore, we believe that these very same continuities are
responsible for a profound misunderstandingof the recent theories of language at the core
of the revisionist critique of social history.
The origins of the continuity between revisionism and social history are to be sought,
first of all, in what Robert Gray has described in an earlierreview in this journalas a 'straw
person model of a class conscious and revolutionary working class, equipped with a
rigorous class ideology and theoretical understanding of the capitalist economy' which
lurks behind the revisionist project, with intellectual consequences almost as powerful as
those it exerted on the social history narrative.31'Class' is consistently understood,
according to this model, in terms of objectively given, rationally ascertainable'interests'
whose salience can be measured in terms of the popular purchase of socialist politics. It
was this 'model' which was implicit in Stedman Jones's earlier presumption that the social
'interests' of working people were not compatible with conservatism - hence his argument
in 'Working-classculture' that 'working-class conservatives weren't really conservative'.
And yet, this model also remains embedded in 'Rethinking Chartism' as a kind of
theoretical barometer with which to measure the historiographical relevance of class in
terms of its capacity to determine working people's conscious self-interest in socialism. It
is according to this logic, at any rate, that Stedman Jones is eventually forced in the face of
conservatism's popular hegemony in contemporary British political culture to the
conclusion that 'class' must not be a particularly significant context for understanding
popular political mobilization.
Events in the now almost decade since the publication of 'Rethinking Chartism' have
fuelled the positive reception of Stedman Jones's assault on class. The collapse of
communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union finds its echo in growing professional
doubts about the moral efficacy and political viability of the political agendas of organized
labour. It is as if certain segments of British Marxism have been driven to confirm the old
conservative critique of socialism as a millenial religious faith, drawing its strength from an
ultimately irrationalbelief in the 'redemptive role of the proletariat'.32The religion of the
working class is being proclaimed a political mis-step in the history of English
intellectuals, one that was out of keeping with indigenous political legacies. Radical and
populist traditions are now being promoted as an alternativepolitical heritage with which
to replace a discredited socialist faith. Beyond this empirical shift, however, is the
stubborn presumption that, as with socialism, so with class - socialist politics presumably
being the verificationof historical sociology.
The most recent exposition of the approach advocated in Languages of Class is Patrick
Joyce's Visions of the People. Industrial England and the Question of Class I848-19I4.
Joyce begins with an extended tribute to Languages of Class, and the agendas of the two
3' Gray, 'The deconstructing of the English along these lines, see 'Faith in history', History
working class', op. cit., 373. Workshop,xxx (Autumn I990), 66.
32 For Stedman Jones's own ruminations

books parallel nicely. Just as Stedman Jones situated his critique of sociological
reductionism in the challenging terrain of Chartism, Joyce situates his in the industrial
north of England where 'Marx and Engels found what they took to be the industrial
proletariatand the class war in their most advanced and starkestforms'.33 Joyce argues that
if 'class' were not present here in 'the England of the textile factory and the mill town
[where] one would expect to find [it] in its most developed form . . . then this suggests
that its significance elsewhere may also have been limited'.34
Here, too, class stands and falls according to whether it is reflected as 'interest' in the
subjective perceptions of individual actors. Why else would one necessarily 'expect to find'
explicit acknowledgements of class power in workers' consciousness unless one were
tacitly presupposing that rather crude relationship between social relations and political
consciousness (alleged to be endemic to the social history project) as the litmus test of the
pertinence of class. This presupposition certainly seems to have guided Patrick Joyce's
recent voyage to the brink of class where, upon finding that the 'vocabularies' of the
labouring poor rarely, if ever, 'made an unalloyed appeal to class', he concludes that 'the
roots of social identity were in important measure seen to lie in ideas and associations taken
from politics, in particularthe populist traditions of popular radicalism'.35
The language of politics, in other words, is now taken to be the 'source'of social identity
- a formulation which suggests the central characteristicsof revisionist linguistics. For the
revisionists, language is not a pale copy of the sensory impressions made on consciousness
by the objective world. Language 'matters' in its own right, is itself of material
consequence because it informs people's consciousness prior to their perceptual encounter
with the world. As Joyce puts it, language is those 'constituent discourses . . . that make
up social consciousness', 'the structures of thought and feeling . . . through which people
make sense of their world'.36Stedman Jones sounds an even more Kantian note in his
references to language as a structure given in advance which defines and articulates
conscious experience.37It is as the originating source of consciousness, at any rate, that
language is deployed in revisionist argument as an archival source through which
historians can gain access to popular belief and motivation. For it is language which
registers the popular purchase of socialism and by implication the salience of class
experience in the absence of electoral returns or opinion polls. Approached in this way, the
history of class has less and less to do with the history of social relations between waged
labourersand capitalists. Instead it is becoming a history of the 'usage'of the word 'class', a
history of class as a 'concept around which different meanings accrue'.38 For it is
'conceptions' and 'ideas'and 'words'- and not socio-economic relations- which claim to be
33 Joyce, V7isions
of the People, op. cit., 2 1. VictonranEngland (X980); 'Labour, capital and
3 ibid. It should be clear that the criticisms compromise: a response to Richard Price',
which follow refer not to the empirical thrust of Social History, ix (I984); and 'The historical
this or earlierworks, but ratherto the conceptual meanings of work: an introduction', Joyce's
conclusions which Joyce draws with regard to editorial introduction to The Historical Mean-
the salience of class and the character of ings of Work(i 987).
language. Patrick Joyce is, of course, a key 35 ibid., 21, 28.
player in historiographical debates about the 36 ibid., II, 338-
Victorian working class. See also WRork, Society 37 Languages of Class, op. cit., 20.
38
and Politics. The Cultureof the F'actoryin Later Joyce, Visionsof the People, op. cit., 335.

178 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
the source of individual and collective identity and, as such, the legitimate focus of
historical research."
This is surely a far cry from the project of the original Marxist social historians - for
whom class was a methodological/theoreticalconcept of the same order of abstraction as,
for example, the post-structuralistconcept of discourse. For them, reducing the history of
class to the history of contemporaryusages of the term 'class'would be comparableto (and
every bit as silly as) reducing the analysis of historical discourses to contemporary usages
of the term 'discourse'. Be that as it may, however, the revisionist reduction of class to
discourses structuring consciousness and perception - the ways people understand,
conceptualize, envisage or explicitly refer to their circumstances - betrays a remarkable
similarity to one of social history's most denigrated manoeuvres - the resort to false
consciousness. For it was here that the old 'new social history', which began theoretically
by giving explanatory priority to social or class position, ended, in many instances, not by
explaining consciousness and behaviour in terms of 'class' (as the revisionists would have
us believe) but by explaining the absence of class consciousness entirely in terms of the
effects of language, cultural traditions and politics on perception.
The most celebrated example of a social historical approach which fell back on
consciousness in that 'last instance' is probably the labour aristocracy thesis most
prominently associated with Hobsbawm.40Consciousness similarlyfigures prominently in
Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn's discussion of the inhibition of bourgeois revolution in
England by the anachronistic domination of an aristocratic 'mode of life, culture and
language'over English society.4i This overpowering aristocraticethos left the 'landowning
classes' in control of the state and, more importantly, distorted the bourgeoisie's
perception of its own pre-ordained historical role of overthrowing feudal relations and
preparing the conditions for socialist ones.42The Anderson-Nairn argument is perhaps
the most explicit illustration of a history self-consciously premised on socio-economic
causality which in the end has recourse to entirely political and cultural explanations.
39 ibid., 339. In this respect, Joyce echoes Revolution. E,arly Industrial Capitalism in
Joan Scott's important revisionist analysis of ThreeEnglish Towns (New York, 1974) and the
class. In what is in many ways a critical review of review by Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Class
'Rethinking Chartism', Scott explicitly approves struggle and the Industrial Revolution' in
of Stedman Jones's equations of class with the Languages of Class, op. cit.; Gray, The Labour
consciousness of class; similarly she treats class Aristocracyin VictorianEdinburgh,op. cit., and
as an historically contingent 'set of conceptual his The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-
terms [our emphasis] for collective identity'. Centu yBritain, c. 185o-19r4 (1I98I); Crossick,
The historiographical task then becomes to An Artisan E,'litein Victorian Society, op. cit.;
'deconstruct' the historically dominant 'concep- and the exchange between Reid and Moorhouse
tions' of identity, bringing to light the 'alterna- in Social History (January 1978-October 1979),
tive representations' which have been system- op. cit.
atically excluded or silenced. See 'On language, 41 Tom Nairn, 'The British political elite' as
gender, and working-class history' and 'Women quoted in E. P. Thompson, 'The peculiaritiesof
in The Making of the E`nglishI'orking Class' in the English' (I965) in ThePoverty of Theoryand
Gender and the Politics of History, op. cit., OtherE'ssays (New York, I978), 256.
68-9o. 42 See Perry Anderson, 'Origins of the present
4' E. J. Hobsbawm, 'The labouraristocracyin crisis' in Towards Socialism (Ithaca, I966); see
nineteenth century Britain' in Labouring Men. also E. P. Thompson's critical response, 'The
Studies in the History of Labour (i 964). See also peculiarities of the English', op. cit.
John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial

May 1992 Social history and its discontents '79
Considered alongside Geoff Eley's and David Blackbourn's criticisms of comparable

notions of peculiar or 'distorted' development in German history, these and similar
illustrations suggest that such recourse to political and cultural explanation is, paradoxi-
cally, endemic to the social history project.43
Social history's reliance upon cultural and political explanation calls the revisionist
move into question on at least two levels. Most obviously, it seems quite wrong to suggest,
as is commonly done in revisionist polemics, that the old social history simply neglected
the constitutive effects of politics, language and culture. Indeed, an overriding concern for
the autonomous power of politics, language and culture to (mis)inform the subjective
perceptions of working people (or, in Anderson's case, of the English bourgeoisie) is a
recurring theme in the social history project, and nowhere more so than in its more
deterministic versions. And that concern flows directly from the a priori assumption about
what the relationship between class and political consciousness would look like if it existed.
Second, it is, ironically, this very same assumption which has 'overdetermined' and
undermined the revisionist approach to language. The understanding of class as a
particular political representation of socially observable interests (i.e. socialism) has
enabled, indeed required, the revisionists' simple reversalof the social historical narrative:
in the absence of a 'pure' socialist consciousness,44 one can only conclude that 'class',
indeed 'the social', is irrelevant to the analysis of political history. And it is this reversal,
originating in assumptions about class and consciousness ratherthan in direct engagement
with literaryand linguistic theory, which informs the revisionists'controversialsevering of
language from its interdependent relationship with any social referent. Thus does Patrick
Joyce, invoking the authority of deconstruction, conclude that the import of the linguistic
turn for historical study is the 'dissolution of the formative link' between social structure
and language which had heretofore defined historical methodology.45 Stedman Jones
similarly began by assuming that any referential connection between political language
and social relations would only be one of representation - one in which social position is
conceived of genetically as the progenitor of its own symbolic representation or reflection
in consciousness. Hence he could first argue in 'Working-class culture' that popular
conservatism was the relatively straightforward representation or reflection of working-
class life rather than a product of political mobilization. By the same token, however,
Stedman Jones's subsequent discovery that Chartist language was not the simple
representationof the interests of an emerging, socially defined proletariat, but owed much
to a prior language of popular radicalism, could lead him to deny - in the name of
Saussurian linguistics - the referential structure of political language altogether. Severed
from any relationship to the social relations of domination and subordination, Chartist
language itself becomes the 'non-referential, prefigurative'source of political subjectivity.
From our perspective, however, this elevation of language to 'non-referential,
prefigurative status' indicates a serious misreading of the Saussurian legacy. Theoretical
43 As its title suggests, David Blackbourn's Eley and Nield, op. cit.
and Geoff Eley's The Peculiarities of German 4 Which, as Robert Gray has pointed out, has
History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in rarely if ever manifested itself; see Gray, 'The
Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, deconstructing of the English working class', op.
1984) is at least partly inspired by Thompson's cit., 373.
earlier critique of Anderson-Nairn. See also 45 Joyce, Visionsof the People, op. cit., 9.

i8o Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
linguistics, particularlyas it has been deployed in its deconstructive variant, does not go on
about the 'arbitrariness'of the sign and the autonomous place of language in order to sever
the metaphorical, referential link between sign and signified, between a word and its
meaning. It does so precisely to raise the referential, metaphoricalfunction of language up
as linguistics' principal concern, in order that the figurative nature of the link between
name' and 'thing named' might be analysed rather than assumed.4f'Put another way,
semiology's approach to language as a complex of signs - ratherthan as a symbolic system
referring to an underlying non-linguistic meaning - does not deny that the sign is
ultimately structured as a metaphor (signifier) which refers to something else (the
signified). Rather, semiology simply questions our naive assumption that the difference
between the signified and the signifier is the categoricaldifference between a phenomenal
entity and its epiphenomenal representation. For this assumption implies that language,
opaque with preconceptions and predispositions, produces the disparity between name
and thing named, a 'margin of error' so to speak between the world and conscious
perceptions of it. And, further, it implies that this margin of error could be overcome as
our knowledge of the world becomes more accurate and our language, in turn, more
transparent.
Semiology proposes, in contrast, that this referentialgap between sign and signified is
internal to language itself, informing its very structure; all speech acts are structured
metaphoricallyas the identification of one thing in terms of something different. The very
act of 'understanding'merely indicates a specifically human capacity 'to express something
new in the language of something old and familiar'.47No knowledge of the world, no
recognition of attributes pre-given in the concrete, material quality of the signified could
therefore produce a perfect correspondence between the sign and the signified. The link
between sign and signified is only established historically through the 'extraneous'power
of social convention.48And it is for this reason, as Paul de Man has argued, that the relation
between sign and signified, word and meaning is discontinuous.49
Language - understood in the bookish sense of words, speech, written text - can
therefore no longer be thought of as a 'secondary derived event in relation to an original'
non-derivative reality.50 But language, nevertheless, remains referential. Its autonomy
derives from the fact that the referent back toward which any sign necessarily turns for its
meaning is not related to the sign by virtue of its phenomenal material qualities. The
referent relates to the sign only as another sign. It is, therefore, already composed as a
metaphor (signifier) which refers back to something else (signified). The real durability
and stability, as well as the apparent unity and homogeneity of the referent is, therefore,
already a fundamentally social and historical matter of human convention. As Derrida
chose (rather misleadingly) to put it, there is nothing categorically prior to the text; 'there
is no pretext, which is not already a text.'51
46Paul de Man made this point with great Contemporary C,iticism (Minneapolis, I983),
clarity in his 'Resistance to theory' in Resistance 209.
to Theory (Minneapolis, I986), Io-I i. s" Jacques Derrida, 'A letter to a Japanese
4' Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. friend' in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Dermida
Walter Kaufmann (New York, I968), 266. Reader: Between the Blinds (New York, i xI),
" de Man, 'Resistance to theory', op. cit., io. 275.
49 de Man, 'The rhetoric of temporality' in 51 Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, 198I),
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of 328.

May 1992 Social history and its discontents
But it does not follow from this that language is thereby invested with the authoritative
'prefigurative' power to 'create', 'orchestrate', 'conceive' or 'define' self-interest and
identity as Stedman Jones and Joyce suggest. Language, on the contrary, is denied both
the capacity transparently to represent an objective world on the one hand, and the
autonomous power to predicate meaning on the other.52Both Derrida and de Man, for
example, are very explicit about this when asserting that no component of language can
exist as a meaningful unit in and of itself. 'And that', according to Derrida,
goes for the word, the very unity of the word deconstruction . . . [which] like all
words acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions,
in what is too blithely called a 'context' . the word has interest only within a certain
. .
context, where it replaces and lets itself be [replaced] by other words.53

The implications of these discussions for the analysis of political language are
profoundly anti-reductive. The metaphorical disjuncture between the word and its
referent, between a sign and its meaning, is replicated in the relationship existing between
political movements, or formal political platforms and their adherents who are always
already embedded in 'prior' social relations.54And it is this disjuncture, this irreducible
gap - irreducible because neither the platform nor the prior social relations of its adherents
can ever be considered the authoritative, definitive source of the relationship - which
makes politics a contingent process of mobilization rather than a determined outcome of
either discursive or socio-economic evolution.55
THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME

In this regard, the new social history came closer to the mark than most of its revisionist
critics. Its ambition, at any rate, was not to replace political with social analysis, but to
'rethink'the political as a problem of mobilization. Thus, ratherthan restricting politics to
the formal institutions of government or understanding political language as disembodied
sets of ideas, this literature aimed its enquiry at the reciprocal relationship between a
political movement and its social base of support. Its main premises were: (i) that
ordinary people are the agents of historical process and change and (z) that their agency
always manifests itself, as E. P. Thompson wrote, 'in terms of a particular complex of
human relations: law, property and power', in the context, that is, of an inherited,
conventional 'structure of social relations'.56Any political movement aspiring to power
would in some measure have to refer back to that 'structureof social relations', confronting
52 de Man, 'Metaphor (second discourse)' in advocated here. For cautionary notes regarding
AllegonresofReading (New Haven, 1979), I58. the stylistic peculiarities of the work of Derrida
5 Derrida, 'A letter', op. cit., 275. and de Man, see Eagleton, Literary Theory, op.
5 de Man makes essentially this point in his cit., and especially The Ideology of the Aesthetic
discussion of the relationship between the (Oxford, I990). For a less generous but
formulation of the law and its application to fascinating interpretation of deconstruction in
particular subject populations in 'Promises particularand 'post-modernism'more generally,
(social contract)' in Allegories, op. Cit., 270-7. see David Harvey's provocative study, The
55 We would like to add here our reservation Conditionof Postmodernity (Oxford, I 989).
that deconstruction has been appropriatedalong 56 Thompson, The Making of the English
lines antithetical to the approach to 'politics' WorkingClass, op. Cit., 205.

I82 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
its particulardefinition of property rights, its structure of authority and the specific forms
of expropriation, conflict and popularcongregation legitimized and delegitimized therein.
And more than this, a political movement would have to engage the massive human
investment - made both through the visible channels of judicial, legislative and executive
state power, as well as through less visible and countless individual acts of piety, deference
and resistance to authority, mutual co-operation and antagonism, etc. - which hold that
structure of social relations in place.
To the extent that this focus on political mobilization was realized, social historical
analysis implicitly approached politics as the problematic attempt to forge a relationship
between a socially 'determined' subject and a political movement which are not by nature
coincident, and which are, therefore, never fully identical. Social analysis (at least
potentially) understood that a gap always remains between a social constituency and its
political identifications. Political language is always relatively autonomous vis-a-vis the
social 'identities' it claims to represent, not because it 'prefigures' those identities but
because the principle mediating the connection is human agency. In this respect, the
efforts to rethink the relationship between class and politics from within the social
historical frameworkcame closer, we believe, to realizing the insights of recent linguistic
and literarytheory than most of the latter's anti-sociological champions.
What social analysis often did not do, however, was to recognize the discursive natureof
'social' identity, particularly in its representation of 'classes' as coherent homogeneous
anthropomorphized historical actors.57Class identity, it was regularly presupposed, is
stamped unambivalently on the individual through her or his position in the relations of
production. The failure of a class to act with a unity of purpose and self-interest was then
interpreted as a contingency of political and cultural 'superstructures' imposed on
consciousness after the fact. The dialectical interplay between social relations and politics
which in any real historical situation exists simultaneously, defining social relations from
the start, was presented as if it occurred as an actual sequence of events in time - as if, to
paraphraseThompson, the social and economic came first while the political trailed after
'at some remote remove'.8 A vision of class such as this works paradoxicallyto exclude
social history's original focus on mobilization; the 'social' (rather than human agency) is
installed as the source of objective identity, while political language and culture (rather
than human agency) are viewed as the source of subjective meaning. A categorical
distinction between a phenomenal (non-political) social identity and its epiphenomenal
political representation thereby finds its way back into the social historical narrative.
'Proper' political identifications are understood to be naturally prefigured in, rather than
conventionally linked to, an individual's social situation. Stedman Jones has been
justifiably critical of the reductionist implications of this interpretive framework. The
question which arises, however, is whether Stedman Jones's reversal of this framework
(granting political language or discourse 'prefigurative'power over subjective identity and
self-interest) provides a genuine analytical alternativeor a subtle reiteration.
As we have seen, this reversal is already implied in a social history which presumed the
causal priority of 'social context' but in the end calls upon the mediating power of language
See Joyce, Visions of the People, op. cit., 58 Thompson, 'The peculiarities of the
339. English', op. cit., 294.

and culture to explain the empirical discrepancies between the 'interests' supposedly
pre-given in social position and the political affiliations of a particular constituency. In
both social historical and revisionist narratives, therefore, culture, politics and language
function as factors mediating perception, as externally imposed screens altering the
conscious subject's clear vision of its objective circumstances.59What finally marksthe two
positions off is this. Social historians have retainedthe ideal of a consciousness determined
by class or social position as the pre-inscribed goal toward which history is ultimately
moving. As a consequence, they find in the mediating power of language a burden to be
overcome. The revisionists, on the other hand, embrace language as the permanent and
legitimate source of individual and collective identity. Or, to paraphraseMarx, the social
historians treat language's autonomous power to prefigure meaning as 'the real chains' of
humanity, just as the revisionists declare it to be 'the true bonds of human society'.60
The break between the old social history and its revision is, therefore, not as clean as it
first appeared. In light of this, E. P. Thompson's famous critique of social histories
premised upon just this culturally and linguistically mediated dialectic between perceiving
subject and its objective social situation takes on renewed significance. In the context of
the early I96os Thompson aimed his criticism at the developing fields of working-classand
labour history in which the culturally mediated dialectic between a worker'sconsciousness
and his or her 'objective' conditions as wage earner remained implied as the model for
working-class formation. In his classic, The Making of the English Working Class,
Thompson argued vehemently that this is a false model of class formation, false precisely
because cultural traditions, political and linguistic conventions are not taken seriously as
the very flesh and bones of social relations.61 They are artificially displaced into some
superstructural realm and thereby degraded to the status of subjective bias. They are
conceived as 'cultural lags and distortions' through which recognition of real interests and
position 'dawns in inefficient ways'.62
But the model is also false because, while it undervalues language, culture and politics,
it also imports into social analysis a gross overestimation of the power of consciousness to
be both the source of social relations and the means of their transformation. Linguistic
conventions and political traditions are but distorting lenses which might be put aside by
objective perception. They are viewed, not as constituents of social existence, but as
problems to be transcended by knowledge of one's real self-interest and of the rational
foundations of society. This, in turn, presumes that the veil of cultural and linguistic
5 Hence Stedman Jones in his majortheoreti- language, gender and working-class history', op.
cal statement can argue that language is not the cit., c6.
simple expression of interest because it 'con- "' Karl Marx, 'The German Ideology' in R.
ceives and defines interest in the first place' Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New
making it impossible to 'peer straight through York, 1978), 149-
these languages into the structural changes to 61 Ellen Meiksins Wood's 'Falling through the
which they may be notionally referred'. See cracks: E. P. Thompson and the debate on base
Languages of Class, op. cit., zz. And Joan Scott, and superstructure' in Harvey J. Kaye and
citing Stedman Jones, treats languages as a sort Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson:
of conceptual filter ('the conceptual categories Critical Perspectives, op. cit., 125-52, has a very
within which empirical data are placed') organ- sophisticated discussion of Thompson's critique
izing our 'ways of perceiving [our emphasis] or of the base/superstructuremetaphor.
understanding, of assigning importance or 62 Thompson, The Making of the English
significance to phenomena or events'. See 'On WorkingClass, op. cit., io.

i84 Social History VOL. I7: NO. 2
convention not only sustains anachronisticallythe social status quo but also that the veil
could be stripped away by thought. Within this framework, the problem of social
transformation ceases to be a political one of mobilizing (by coercive means or by
consensual appeals to people's sense of honour, fear, shame, material security, greed or
piety, etc.) diverse and active individuals. Instead it is reduced to a problem of knowledge,
a problem of replacing false consciousness with true. And lurking behind this apparently
slipshod substitution of epistemology for politics, according to Thompson, is often an
insidious attempt to authorize some 'party, sect or theorist' as the privileged agent of
demystification.63
To be sure, Thompson's critique bears the marks, and also some of the limitations, of
his generation's concern with the oppressive politics of Stalinist party organization. And
certainly Thompson draws much of his inspiration from Marx's critique in The German
Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach of the naive materialism of the Young Hegelians, and
utopian socialists who in taking 'religious ideas, conceptions, in short all the products of
consciousness to be the real chains of men, their limitations . . . put to men the moral
postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for critical consciousness, thereby
removing their limitations . . .'64 But we seriously misread Thompson if we follow
Stedman Jones's casual assertions that a Marxist genealogy such as this carries with it a
residual economic reductionism at the expense of politics. For Marx's critique of
consciousness, and Thompson's invocation of that critique65are not directed againstthose
who privilege pragmaticpolitical activity, but against those who ultimately want to avoid it
in their proposals to eliminate the inequities of social relations simply through the popular
acquisition of a new perception, through the exchange of this for that consciousness.
Their critique, as is well known, is directed against a naive Lockean materialismwhich
presumes that 'men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore,
changed men are products of other circumstances, and changed upbringing' - an
environmental, mechanical materialism, the very rigour of which 'necessarily arrives at
dividing society into two parts, of which one towers above society'.6 The application of
this sort of materialism in, for example, the aforementioned social histories of Anderson
and Nairn encounters a discrepancy between people's materialcircumstancesand popular
interpretationsof those circumstances, and inevitably explains this discrepancyin terms of
the mediating power of language, politics, culture, religion, etc. Such a materialism
invariablyand paradoxicallyends by proposing to transformsocial relations via an entirely
cognitive, intellectual process of demystification: a process in which the way the world
appears in our imaginative representationscomes to coincide with the way the world is in
'reality'.
This Marxist critique of vulgar materialism retains its relevance to contemporary
discussions of language, class and politics for two reasons. In the first place, its strictures
63 This paragraph derives in part from an third Thesis on P'euerbachin the context of his
earlier formulation in David Mayfield, 'Lan- critical discussion of Robert Owen in The
guage and social history' in Social History, XVI,3 Making of the English WorkingClass, op. cit.,
(October1991), 353-8. 787.
64 Karl Marx, 'The German Ideology', op. 66 Marx, 'Theses on Feuerbach' in Tucker
Cit., 149. (ed.), op. cit., I44.
65 See Thompson's direct citation of Marx's

May 1992 Social history and its discontents i85
are as applicable to Marxism's revisionist critics as it was to its own 'vulgar' practitioners.
Stedman Jones, for example, similarly explains language's autonomy from the 'social' by
virtue of its mediating power to 'prefigure'our experience of the world. Language is not
the simple expression of material interest or experience because it 'articulates', 'conceives
and defines' interest in the first place.67Having granted language autonomy in this sense,
Stedman Jones is also at one with his social historical predecessors in viewing the
discordance between political statements and their meaning as illusory. The deviation of
Chartist statements from their social meaning is only apparent and results from the
application of a false 'Marxist or sociological conception' which presumes that social
location rather than political language constitutes constituencies.68
In the second place, Marx'sand Thompson's critique is in many respects the analogue of
de Man's and Derrida's deconstruction of the symbolic conceptions of language which
grant language the power to predicate meaning and hold this power responsible for the
non-correspondence between perception and 'reality', between the conscious subject and
its objective 'being', between name and 'thing named'.69 Both deconstruction70 and
Thompson's Marxism attempt to undermine just this view (operative in Stedman Jones
and Joyce)71that the autonomy of the sign from its referent, of social 'consciousness' from
social 'being', derives from a power inherent in language to preconceive, predefine or
prefiguremeaning prior to our perceptualengagement with the world. And the conceptual
acuity of both deconstruction and Thompson's Marxism resides in their respective
demonstrations that this elevation of language and discourse to causal stature derives
from, or is not dissociable from, the seemingly polar opposite theoretical position which
would make language the determined expression of objective non-linguistic material
reality.
CONCLUSIONS
It is therefore not surprising that both of these apparently antithetical positions surface in
Stedman Jones's work. His 'Working-classculture' article was committed, he admits, to
'infer the political from the social';72popular politics was interpreted as the secondary
expression or representation of more fundamental social experiences. 'Rethinking
Chartism', in contrast, located the source of popular political affiliation in the language of
politics itself - leaving political behaviour no reference to factors outside those named in
political language (i.e. to social relations). What we have argued is that these two opposed
approachesimply one another. For the transition from the first to the second had a definite
logic internal to it: having originally confused reference for representation, it followed that
67 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op. with (for example) Joan Scott's understanding
Cit., 22. of 'deconstruction' put forth in her Gender and
68
ibid., 21, 23. the Politics of History (New York, x988).
69
de Man's'Rhetoric of temporality', op. cit., 7' Joyce, for example, repeatedly refers to
is the most important deconstruction of sym- language and discourse as a medium 'structuring
bolic treatments of language. the ways the social order is perceived'. See
70 We use this word cautiously as a shorthand Visions of the People, op. cit., 339, 338, 342 for
denoting specifically the work of Paul de Man examples.
and Derrida. We do not feel that our under- 72 Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, op.
standing of their work is particularlycompatible cit., I][.

I86 Social History VOL. I7: NO. 2
his disavowal of the interpretationof politics as representationshould proceed by denying

language's referential form altogether. It then followed that political languages could be
separated out as autonomous symbolic and conceptual systems which themselves
possessed the power to 'produce' the 'interest, identification, grievance, and aspiration'73
of people without reference to their alreadyestablished, power-riddensocial relations.
By way of contrast to Stedman Jones's approachto language, class and politics, we have
reviewed Marxist and 'deconstructive' approaches which acknowledge the autonomy of
'language'(understood as speech and written texts) from the prior, underlying meaning to
which it refers. At the same time, however, these latter do not suggest that the autonomy of
language, the discrepancybetween words and their referents, names and 'things named', is
somehow the result of a power of language to 'prefigure'or predicate meaning. On the
contrary, the discontinuity between name and 'thing named' derives, according to
Marx/Thompson as well as de Man/Derrida, from the fact that the referentialconnection
between the two (a connection upon which meaning depends) is secured politically by a
power which is externalto both. The link between sign and meaning, in other words, is not
a function of cognition but of human convention.
It is useful to translatethis linguistic terminology back into Thompson's social historical
idiom. 'Attention must be paid', suggests Thompson, 'to the autonomy of political and
cultural events', because an element of discordanceis always present between 'social being'
and its interpretations in 'social consciousness'. Hence, any 'history or sociology which is
continually reducing a superstructure to a base [which is to say social consciousness to
social being] is either false or tedious'.74With this Stedman Jones would no doubt agree.
But from whence this autonomy? In answerto this, Thompson swerves decisively from his
revisionist critics. For Thompson, the autonomy of 'social consciousness' - of politics,
culture and language- does not derive from what Stedman Jones sees as language'spower
to 'articulate'certain aspects of social existence and change while filtering out others.75On
the contrary, the disequilibrium residing at the core of the relationship between social
being and social consciousness results from the fact that their linkage is a product of human
convention - a product, that is, of mobilizing in the most general sense active men and
women. Interestingly, Thompson made this point explicitly in his earlier polemic against
the social history of Anderson and Nairn. 'The dialectical intercoursebetween social being
and social consciousness - between 'culture' and 'not culture' - is at the heart of any
comprehension of the historical process within the Marxist tradition.'76 But the
relationship between them is not mediated through a 'complex of superstructures' (i.e.
through language), as Nairn would have it, 'which apprehends what underlies them only
73 ibid., 22. vantage point of the history of the Labour party,

74 Thompson, 'The peculiarities of the it is not these changes in themselves that matter.
English', op. cit., 290. What matters is which of these changes are
7S See, for example, Stedman Jones's dis- articulated and how, within the successive and
cussion of the role of the 'social' in the evolution various discourses which have coexisted within
of the British Labour party, in Languages of the Labour party, or which have impinged upon
Class, op. cit., 23: 'Of course, social and it or threatened it from the outside. The place of
structural changes in twentieth-century the social would have to be, in this context,
England are of fundamental importance and no resituated within discursive relations.'
discussion of politics, labour or otherwise, could 76 Thompson, 'The peculiarities of the
proceed in ignorance of them. But, from the English',op. cit., 289.

partially and indirectly'.77 Mediation between social being and social consciousness,
between 'interest' and 'belief', is rather'through the people themselves'.78
For Thompson, then, the problem of human agency is situated precisely here in the gap
between 'interest and belief', between 'social being and social consciousness', between
prevailing social relations (and all the obligatory acts of obedience, discipline, deference,
collegiality, love, etc. implied therein) and our imaginative interpretations of those
relations. A history which excludes human agency as the principle mediating this
dialectical gap will a priori miss the point - and not only because it inevitably severs
language from its imbeddedness in social relations of unequal power and authority, but
also because it severs languagefrom its purposive deployment in political contest to alter or
maintain them.
Harnessing human agency to the fundamentally linguistic problem of reference, as
Thompson does, by no means implies that human beings, ratherthan language or material
reality, are the 'source'of meaning, or that individuals are in full, unconditional control of
their intentions and acts. It is rather this very articulation of agency to language that
renders human existence historically conditioned and mediated. Recently, it has been the
literature of deconstruction which has made this point most persuasively. As de Man
argued, the moment the self 'chooses language as its sole mode of existence',79 the
'possibility of an unmediated act that knows no past' is precluded.80The instant language
is creatively deployed, it generates the problem of historical time by virtue of the
'inevitable pastness of any trope, the inevitable reliance of any sign on a referent which is
prior to it'.81Confined within the referential frameworkof language, the individual act is
simultaneously both a creative intent oriented toward the future and an interpretive
process coming 'after'that intent which is unavoidably oriented toward the past. Hence, as
de Man argued, 'The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater
the dependence on the past.'82
Marx, we think, meant something like this in his famous dictum that 'men make their
own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves'. A fuller
quotation from this passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte makes clear
the link between human agency and the irreducibly referentialstructure of language:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly
found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged
in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new,
precisely in such epochs of revolutionarycrisis they conjure up the spirits of the past
Cited by Thompson in ibid., 290. struction where the relationship between inten-
78ibid., emphasis Thompson. tion, historical time and the referentialstructure
7 de Man, 'The literary self as origin: the of language is worked out. But see also Derrida,
work of Georges Poulet' in Blindness and 'Psyche: inventions of the other' in Kamuf (ed.),
Insight, op. cit., Ioo. A Dernida Reader, op. cit., zoi-zo; 'Signature
80 de Man, 'Literary history and literary event context' in ibid., 82-I i I.
modernity', ibid., 151-2. 82 de Man, 'Literary history and literary
81 de Man, 'The rhetoric of temporality' is modernity', op. cit., I 6 i.
probably the most important text within decon-

i88 Social History VOL. 17: NO. 2
to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to
present the new scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this
borrowed language. . . . In like manner the beginner who has learnt a new language
always translates it back into his mother tongue.83
Our point has not been to denigrate the 'linguistic turn' in social science. Quite the
opposite. As historical subjects we are made up of language's strangely composite
ambivalent structure, a structure in which human agency resides as the mediating
principle, and through which the psychological complexity of our 'intentions' and
'purposes' is guaranteed. Women and men make history, but not as they please: at least in
part because they cannot help 'intending' one thing and 'doing' another, because there is no
way to say anything without meaning something else. That is perhaps the way Derrida or
de Man might have put it. We would agree, but prefer a more Thompsonian formulation:
there is no way to act with political purpose without one's political language referringback
to prevailing social relations, the embodiment of the 'spirits of the past', as the unavoidable
ground of such action.
That said, we are still far from resolving the problem that the relationship between
politics and society, social consciousness and social being, language and class, has long
posed to historical analysis. Our purpose has been simply to question recent historio-
graphical trends which suggest that language is somehow the key to the problem in its
guise as a non-referential and 'prefigurative'source of subjective political identifications.
We have suggested that not only is language fundamentally referential, but that it is in its
referential structure that human agency finds both its condition and its constraint.
Political communication, like all other, consists precisely in the identificationof one thing
in terms of another different thing; it is only by such means that we are able to give
expression to our desires, pieties and powerfully held beliefs. It was social analysis which
first drew attention to something much like this'linguistic' gap in its conceptualization of
political mobilization - a conceptualization predicated on a disjuncture between
movement and constituency that was, in turn, premised upon a complex view of
subjectivity (as well as a contingent and negotiated understanding of historical process).
As long as the new discursive-political revision works to suppress this complexity, it will
not restore politics to its proper prominence in our understanding of historical change. It
will simply continue to refine the strategies through which the problem of politics has
always been avoided.
University of Michigan
and Duke University
83 Marx, 'The Eighteenth Brumaireof Louis Bonaparte'in Tucker (ed.), op cit., 595.


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Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language

Author(s): David Mayfield and Susan Thorne

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Social history and its discontents:

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scientific explanation. And this 'dissolution of the social'2presages, it is thought, nothing

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working-class politics in London, I870-1900: notes on the remaking of a working class'

THE OLD 'NEW SOCIAL HISTORY'

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political mobilization as opposed to the calculations of elites." 'Class' functioned as the

" This reconceptualization of politics in Critical Perspectives (Oxford, I990).

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reconciled with socialist or quasi-socialist aspirations. The popular appeal of liberalism,

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I' ibid., I96-200. Missionary Society, 1705-1925' (Ph.D. disser-

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THE LINGUISTIC TURN

(1972). cal approach to Chartism, whose starting point

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Notwithstanding its coincidence with the socio-economic 'events' of the Industrial

24 these intellectual traditions are made to speak:

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THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

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argue, in significant elements of continuity between the two frameworks,notwithstanding

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Considered alongside Geoff Eley's and David Blackbourn's criticisms of comparable

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context, where it replaces and lets itself be [replaced] by other words.53

THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME

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his disavowal of the interpretationof politics as representationshould proceed by denying

73 ibid., 22. vantage point of the history of the Labour party,

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