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Fanning the Spark of Hope in

the Past: the British Marxist
Historians
Harvey J. Kaye
Published online: 08 Jun 2011.

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 Rethinking History 4:3 (2000), pp. 281–294

Fanning the Spark of Hope in the Past: the

British Marxist Historians

Harvey J. Kaye
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
We have assembled in this extraordinary international congress, on the eve
of a new century, to assess this past century’s historiographies and to delib-
erate where we should take our beloved discipline. In particular, I have been
asked to speak reectively of the British Marxist historians.
Yet before I do, I must pause to ask: how should we pursue such assess-
ments? Beyond the essential scholarly objectivity, and beyond the desired
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literary artistry, what should we value in the writing of history? Ultimately,

what do we hope to accomplish through our historical endeavours?
We could simply defer to ascendant forces. We could acknowledge the
triumph of capital and proceed to rank historiographical traditions in terms
of the total sales Žgures of their respective scholars’ books. Or we could bow
to resurgent fundamentalisms and base our assessments on how often state
and priestly authorities have included a particular school’s writings in ofŽcial
canons and curricula. Obviously, I joke. And yet, given the respective impera-
tives of capitalism and fundamentalism, I do so with some anxiety.
The question remains: how should we appraise Twentieth century histori-
ographies? Because our answers will surely reect our differing conceptions
of the purpose and promise of historical study and thought, I will start by
making my own clear.
Like so many of my generation of the 1960s and 70s, I entered historical
studies possessed of a vision of the discipline in which we were to serve as
citizen-scholars. My fellow students and I truly aspired to contribute to
ongoing struggles for liberty, equality and democracy.
We wanted to cultivate and promote critical historical memory, con-
sciousness and imagination and, thereby, to inspire radical–democratic
change. Undeniably, circumstances have changed. We have aged. The
struggles have abated. The world has witnessed dramatic and unexpected
developments.
Nevertheless, the challenges and responsibilities persist. Inequalities of
power and wealth, both in America and globally, intensify. Corporate power
extends itself into every sphere. Populist nationalisms occasionally turn racist
and xenophobic, resulting in war and ethnic cleansing.
Arguably, the challenges and responsibilities have become all the greater.
The renowned historian of the French Revolution, François Furet closed
his Žnal major work, The Passing of an Illusion (1999), a history of Twenti-
eth century communism, with reections on the state of our political lives and
political vision. I know many of my colleagues on the left have expressed

Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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 282 Harvey J. Kaye

reservations about, if not scorn for, Furet, because of his alignment with con-
servative forces.
But consider this: Furet – who in his youth had stood on the left, but after
1956 had moved steadily rightwards – did not accept that humanity was inca-
pable of imagining and pursuing anything more progressive than capitalist
democracy. To his credit, he did not subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992)
audacious thesis about the ‘End of History’ or Margaret Thatcher’s bold
assertion, parroted today by politicians right and left, that ‘there is no alterna-
tive’. Furet wrote:
The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and
no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying
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to formulate a new concept. Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it

is. This condition is too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies
to last. Democracy, by virtue of its existence, creates the need for a world
beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital, a world in which a genuine human
community can ourish. . . . The proletarian revolution, Marxist–Leninist
science, the ideological election of a party, a territory, or an empire have
undoubtedly come to an end along with the Soviet Union. The disappearance
of these Žgures familiar to our century brings our age to a close; it does not,
however, spell the end of the democratic repertory.
(Furet 1999: 502–3)1

Whatever reservations I might have had, I say ‘Three cheers for Furet!!!’.
Of course, historians cannot themselves conjure up a political vision for
the Twenty-Žrst century, democratic or otherwise. Neither Furet nor I would
allow for such a thing. However, I think Furet would have agreed with me
when I say that historians do have much to offer to democratic thought and
politics.
Ruling classes and governing elites have always rightly feared history and
persistently tried to control knowledge and understanding of the past. In this
way they have hoped to persuade those whom they have dominated that the
way things are is the way they ought to be or, at least, the only way they can
be. The powerful have forever sought to set limits to memory, consciousness
and imagination in order to instill a worldview that proclaims ‘resistance is
futile’.
Though I hate to link them together in the same sentence, I have in mind
both the receding century’s totalitarian regimes and not merely a few of its
more liberal ones. Most of us in attendance here may not be trapped in an
Orwellian nightmare. But who among us would deny the need for vigilance?
Even now we should heed the warning of historian Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi:
In the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of
collective memory and the declining consciousness of the past, but of the
 The British Marxist Historians 283

aggressive rape of whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the

historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of the
powers of darkness. Against the agents of oblivion, the shredders of docu-
ments, the assassins of memory, the revisers of encyclopedias, the conspirators
of silence, against those, who, in Kundera’s wonderful image, can airbrush a
man out of a photograph so that nothing is left of him but his hat – only the
historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central
to his vocation, can effectively stand guard.
(Yerushalmi 1996: 116)

Wielding the powers of the past – perspective, critique, consciousness,

remembrance, and imagination – we historians can encourage awareness that,
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however tragic and ironic the dialectic of history, the creation of polities and
social orders characterized by greater freedom, equality and democracy is
possible. We can proffer no guarantees, no predeterminations or predestina-
tions – just possibilities. And we have a democratic obligation to do so (Kaye
1991 and 1996).
Furthermore, we can advance the historical education of desire – that is,
we can inform popular deliberations and agencies with the experiences, aspir-
ations and visions of those who have preceded us. As the English writer John
Berger years ago remarked: ‘A people or class which is cut off from its own
past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has
been able to situate itself in history’ (Berger 1972).
The words of the German–Jewish critic and Frankfurt School associate,
Walter Benjamin, who tragically succumbed to despair and committed suicide
in the Pyrennes while trying to escape the Nazis, continue to summon us. In
Theses in the Philosophy of History, Benjamin wrote:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past
who is Žrmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy [the
ruling class] if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
(Benjamin 1991)

I now turn to speak of the British Marxist historians. I refer speciŽcally to

that ‘generation’ which included senior Žgures like Cambridge University
economist, Maurice Dobb, and journalists and writers, A.L. Morton and
Dona Torr, but whose central and foremost members were Rodney Hilton,
Christopher Hill, George Rudé, E.P. (Edward) Thompson, Dorothy Thomp-
son, John Saville, Eric Hobsbawm, and Victor Kiernan (Kaye 1984 and
1992).
The intellectual and political formation of this generation of historians
began in the 1930s, in the shadows of the Depression, the triumph of Fascism
in Central and Southern Europe, and the ever-increasing likelihood of a
Second World War. (If nothing else, recalling those days should serve to
 284 Harvey J. Kaye

remind us that, however daunting our own task, we surely face less horriŽc
circumstances.)
Those then-young men and women perceived the British Labour Party to
be incapable of adequately addressing the crisis of capital and the threat to
freedom and democracy. Seeking a more radical alternative, they joined the
Communist Party while still at university, hoping to contribute to working-
class struggles and the making of socialism.
War interrupted their studies and campaigning, and many of them served
in combat roles in the British Army. Returning home in 1945 to complete
their degrees and secure teaching posts, they came together in the Commu-
nist Party Historians’ Group, eager to foster and popularize a Marxist
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interpretation of English and British history.

Eric Hobsbawm has observed that ‘for some the Group was, if not exactly
a way of life, then at least a small cause, as well as a minor way of structur-
ing leisure. For most it was also a friendship’. He added that ‘physical aus-
terity, intellectual excitement, political passion and friendship are probably
what the survivors remember best – but also a sense of equality’. By equal-
ity, Hobsbawm meant that all in the Group recognized that they were ‘equally
explorers of largely unknown terrain. Few hesitated to speak in discussion,
even fewer to criticize, none to accept criticism’. (We should all be fortunate
to have such colleagues and to experience such intellectual comradeship.)
Though their collective endeavours met with limited success beyond
Marxist circles, one initiative – pursued independently by several members of
the Group – led to the foundation in 1952, of the now-prestigious journal,
Past & Present. Of far greater import, the Group served as the incubator of
British Marxist historiography. And here we should not fail to appreciate the
historiographical and theoretical contributions of Dobb, Torr and Morton.
In Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Žrst published in 1946),
Dobb advanced Marx’s conception of capitalism against the prevailing
Weberian and Pirennian conceptions. That is, against those deŽnitions that
reduced capitalism to entrepreneurialism, commerce or trade, Dobb treated
capitalism as a mode of production, at the heart of which prevailed inher-
ently antagonistic social relations of exploitation, speciŽcally, the wage
relationship.
Dobb directed members’ thinking away from economic and technological
determinisms, towards a richer political–economic analysis, and he focussed
his younger comrades’ historical attentions on class relations and conicts
(Dobb 1946).2
Morton’s and Torr’s contributions drew on the liberal and social–demo-
cratic labor-history tradition originated by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, John
and Barbara Hammond, and G.D.H. Cole (Sutton (1982) and Cole and Post-
gate (1946)). Both Morton and Torr impressed upon their younger colleagues
 The British Marxist Historians 285

that the critical refashioning of British history had to entail more than empha-
sizing political economy and class. It had to involve, as well, the recovery of
the experiences of the ‘common people’.
In A People’s History of England (published in 1938), Morton led the way
in ‘democratizing’ the past. His text extended the bounds of those who were
to be included in the historical record and it made that record accessible to a
popular readership. (Even today – with all its faults – A People’s History
affords a model of popular history writing from which we could learn)
(Morton 1938).
Though Dona Torr herself often defended orthodoxy, she fervently chal-
lenged her comrades in the Group to reject economic determinism and fatal-
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ism, and seek to understand consciousness and agency in the making of

history, especially the consciousness and agency of the ‘lower orders’. She
opened her book Tom Mann and His Times (published in 1956) with a quote
from the Nineteenth century labour Žgure, William Newton: ‘It must be our
task, our duty, to keep green the memory of our order, to record its struggles,
to mark its victories, point to fresh conquests, and to gather from defeats the
elements of success. . . . We should see then that the world grasps civilization
with the rough large hand of the labourer, not with the slim gloved Žngers of
the noble’.3
In 1956, Khruschev delivered his speech on Stalinism to the Soviet Com-
munist Party, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and the British Commu-
nist Party failed both to oppose the invasion and to democratize itself. In the
wake of those events, the majority of the historians resigned from the party
in protest, many of them having played leading roles in failed attempts to
reform it.
Departing the party and the Group, the historians did not reject socialism,
though they now championed a more democratic and humanistic socialist
politics. Neither did they abandon Marxism, though they now articulated an
even more critical and historical understanding of it (for example, Thomp-
son 1960). Only the editorial board of Past & Present continued to bind
many of them together organizationally after 1956. And yet, the histories they
wrote register how closely aligned intellectually they remained.
Imbued with the ideas and aspirations cultivated in the Group, the younger
historians authored their most important works in the decades following the
mid-1950s. They did not just render major contributions to their respective
Želds of study, they also effectively recast those Želds. Consider Rodney
Hilton’s work in medieval and peasant studies and Christopher Hill’s in studies
of the Seventeenth century and the English Revolution (now often referred to
as ‘Hill’s Century’). Think about George Rudé’s, Eric Hobsbawm’s, and
Edward Thompson’s in the social history of the Industrial and French Revo-
lutions and popular movements; John Saville’s, Dorothy Thompson’s, Edward
 286 Harvey J. Kaye

Thompson’s, and Hobsbawm’s in the Želd of Nineteenth century labour

history; and Victor Kiernan’s and Hobsbawm’s in studies of European history
and imperialism.4
I cannot resist reciting several of their book titles. Each has come to denote
far more than a single volume. And I confess that each also sounds rather
poetic to this romantic radical democrat: Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free and
Class Conict and the Crisis of Feudalism; Hill’s Puritanism and the English
Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, and The Experience of Defeat;
Rude’s The Crowd in the French Revolution, Wilkes and Liberty and, co-
authored with Hobsbawm, Captain Swing; Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels,
Labouring Men, Bandits, The Age of Revolution, and Echoes of the Mar-
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seillaise; Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class,

Customs in Common, and Witness Against the Beast; and Kiernan’s The
Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History, The Lords of Human Kind, and
European Empires from Conquest to Collapse.
Transcending their many individual contributions, the historians made
four paramount ‘collective’ contributions to historical studies and thinking.
First, against the prevailing liberal and Marxist orthodoxies alike, the his-
torians developed class-struggle analysis and demonstrated the class-struc-
tured character of history. They drew their central working hypothesis – “The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle” – from
Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. And, critically equipped, the his-
torians proceeded, as Marx himself had insisted, to study history afresh.
Through their research and writing, the British Marxists showed that the
medieval world was not consensually organized into three estates but, rather,
was an order of struggle between lords and peasants; that the conicts of
Seventeenth century England represented not simply a civil war but, all the
more, a ‘bourgeois revolution’ propelled, in part, by struggles of the lower
orders; that the Eighteenth century was not conict-free but, instead, as
Edward Thompson contended, shot through with tensions and antagonisms
between ‘patricians and plebeians’ and powerfully shaped by ‘class struggle
without class’; and that the Industrial Revolution entailed not only dramatic
economic change and social disruption, but also, in the course of the battles
between ‘Capital and Labour’, a radical, if not heroic, process of class for-
mation determined in great part by the creative agency of working people
themselves (Cannindine 1999).5
The historians developed class-struggle analysis not merely to better grasp
rebellion and revolution. They also sought to reveal the forms that such
struggles took in times of relative social tranquility. The historians enlarged
the very scope of what we were to understand as ‘struggle’, and they afforded
us a fuller appreciation of ‘resistance’ to imposition, exploitation and
oppression.
Second, the historians critically advanced history from below – or, as we
 The British Marxist Historians 287

Americans say, ‘history from the bottom up’. The French Annalistes may have
originated this approach; but the British Marxists turned it in a more critical
direction.
Given their interest in class struggle, the British Marxists – especially
Victor Kiernan – did not fail to attend to the powerful and propertied (for
example Kiernan 1980 and Kaye 1988, and also Thompson 1975), but they
especially committed their energies to reappropriating the lives and agencies
of the labouring classes – peasants, artisans and workers.
Marx himself had called attention to the suppression of working-class
history. On one occasion he stated: ‘I know the heroic struggles the English
working class has gone through since the middle of the last century; struggles
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not the less glorious because they are shrouded in obscurity and burked by
middle-class historians’. And in a paragraph we have come to know by heart,
E. P. Thompson declared his and his comrades’ historical ambitions:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’
handloom weavers, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded followers of
Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and
traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may
have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy.
But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.
Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were
casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
(Thompson 1963: 12)

The British Marxist historians compelled us to reconsider so much that for

so long had been ignored or just taken for granted. For example, simply by
asking who actually had participated in the supposedly infamous street
actions of late Eighteenth century London and Paris, George Rude trans-
formed ‘mobs’ into ‘crowds’.
Whereas aristocrats and conservatives had projected their fears onto the
riots of the day and presumed the people in the streets to have been the ‘dregs
of society’, ‘thieves’, ‘savages’, ‘beggars’ and ‘prostitutes’, populists and lib-
erals had projected their dreams onto the rioters. Neither party knew or cared
to know more than what they needed or wanted to believe. By venturing into,
and examining, the police and judicial records – rather than just looking
down from on high and projecting one’s own biases and assumptions – Rude
restored to the people in the crowd their identities and faces. And, by asking
what might actually have motivated the crowds to act, Rude restored to the
lower orders and ‘menu people’ their needs, their values and their minds. So
much of what had been dismissed as merely criminal activity or the work of
the ‘swinish multitude’, has now come to be recognized as the ‘popular poli-
tics’ of those who were politically marginalized or excluded.
Third, the historians recovered England’s ‘radical-democratic tradition’.
 288 Harvey J. Kaye

They revealed not a narrow history of ideas originating in the heads of intel-
lectuals, but a history of popular ideology standing in dialectical relationship
to the traditional history of politics and ideas. Alongside Magna Carta we
now encounter the Peasant Rising of 1381 calling for an end to overlords.
Outside of Parliament in the Seventeenth century we now witness Levellers,
Diggers and Ranters demanding rights and equalities. In the streets of Eight-
eenth century London, we now hear not just John Wilkes, but also the
common people asserting the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’. And in the Age
of Revolution we now behold English Jacobins, Luddites, and Chartists plant-
ing new trees of liberty and cultivating democratic possibilities.
At the same time, the British Marxists established their own ‘intellectual’
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pantheon: John Ball and his fellow radical priests in the late Fourteenth
century; Gerrard Winstanley, John Milton, and John Bunyan in the Seven-
teenth; Tom Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft in the late Eighteenth; and
William Wordsworth, William Blake, William Cobbett, Robert Owen, Ernest
Jones, Karl Marx, and William Morris in the Nineteenth.6
Yet the British Marxists did not leave it at that. They explored the dialec-
tics of ideology and popular protest. Based both on their democratic sensi-
bilities and on what they discovered in the archives, they rejected the Leninist
conception of class formation and politics which emphasized a vanguard or
substitutionist role for intellectuals in leading workers to class consciousness.
The histories they produced reected a richer Gramscian understanding of
the process of class formation and the relationship between intellectuals and
working people.
Through the works of the British Marxists we have come to appreciate the
common people in history not simply as economic agents, that is, as labour-
ers and material providers, not simply as political agents, that is, as rebels
and insurgents, but also as cultural agents, that is, as valuers and visionaries.
In short, peasants, artisans and workers – not only philosophers and theor-
ists – have contributed to the making of our modern conceptions, relations
and practices of liberty, equality and democracy.
Finally, by way of class-struggle analysis, history from the bottom up, and
the recovery of the radical democratic tradition, the British Marxists effec-
tively ‘deconstructed’ the grand narratives of Right and Left. They under-
mined both the Liberal–Whig and the Orthodox–Marxist versions of history.
In the former case, modern English freedoms were comprehended as the
outcome of a continuously unfolding, ever-advancing, evolutionary process
commencing in Anglo–Saxon times. And in the latter case, world history was
conceived of as a pre–arranged series of progressive stages determined by
technological and economic developments (in the fashion of ‘Base & Super-
structure’).
The British Marxists challenged both the cold-war modernizationist and
 The British Marxist Historians 289

the cold-war Marxist stories of the making of the modern world, both of
which accentuated and celebrated the ‘role of the bourgeoisie and middle
classes’ in the development of capitalism and liberal democracy. They also
confronted the myths of postwar social science and history, such as ‘peasant
passivity’ and ‘working-class authoritarianism’.
But they did more than undermine, challenge and confront. The British
Marxists excavated and laid the foundations for a new grand narrative of
history. Again, this new narrative appreciates human agency and the funda-
mental role of working people in the making of the modern world, not just
as labourers and material providers, but also as progenitors of and aspirants
for freedom, equality and democracy.
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Dreams of proletarian revolution aside, we now know, in the words of

German social scientist Dietrich Rueschmeyer, that “the working class has
proved to be – with few exceptions – the most consistently pro-democratic
social class’ (Rueschmeyer 1995, also Rueschmeyer et al. 1993).
Stated in the briefest of terms: The British Marxist historical tradition has
inuenced work across the social sciences and humanities, from labour,
slavery, and peasant studies, to literary, cultural, and women studies. And
their own works – so very English in character – have inspired critical scholar-
ship globally.
Admittedly, in the years following 1956, political participation and
activism varied among the historians. But every one of them remained com-
mitted to recovering the past from the bottom up, making it available beyond
the realm of academe, and addressing extra-academic audiences with the his-
torical insights and perspectives secured in the archives. Essays and reviews
by Hilton, Hill, Hobsbawm, Thompson and Kiernan regularly appeared in
the periodical press’s literary and opinion pages. Though their scholarly
accomplishments brought them public prominence, their prominence did not
constrain them.7
In fact, the British Marxist historians served as an important bridge
between the older and newer British lefts. In 1956, John Saville and Edward
Thompson published The Reasoner to pressure for Communist Party reform.
On their departure from the party they renamed it The New Reasoner: A
Journal of Socialist Humanism, and their contributors included their his-
torian comrades and other sympathetic socialists. And, in 1959, they merged
The New Reasoner with the Universities and Left Review, a journal produced
by Oxford University students, to create New Left Review (Dworkin 1997:
45–125).
Notably, the two Žgures of the Group who achieved the greatest scholarly
renown, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, also came to be recognized
as Britain’s foremost ‘public intellectuals’ of the Left. Hobsbawm had
remained in the party, but it did not prevent him from producing great, if not
 290 Harvey J. Kaye

paradigm-setting, work. In The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, The Age of

Capital, 1848–1875, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, and The Age of
Extremes, 1914–1991, he essentially established the temporal framework for
the study of modern European and world history.8 And, by the late 1970s,
Hobsbawm emerged not only as our ‘premier Marxist historian’, but also as
a venerated voice of the British left and (though still a Communist) an advisor
to leaders of the Labour Party (see for example Hobsbawm 1989).
Edward Thompson consistently remained the most politically engaged of
the historians right up until his early death in 1993. In the tradition of Tom
Paine and William Cobbett, he wrote and campaigned for the ‘rights of free-
born Britons’. In the 1950s, Thompson enlisted in the Campaign for Nuclear
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Disarmament (CND); in the 1970s, he directed brilliant broadsides against

the British Establishment, accusing the powers that be of trampling on the
rights of British citizens and seeking to undo the social and economic gains
they had secured; and, in the early 1980s, he co-founded European Nuclear
Disarmament (END). In every instance – whether challenging the structures
and agents of the Cold War or those of ruling-class domination – he sought
to draw his fellow Britons ‘Out of Apathy’ by reminding them of their radical
heritage.9
Perhaps – given the record of our Age of Extremes – modesty, scepticism
and reservation are in order. Yet we do not seem to suffer from democratic
audacity, ambition, and hyper-activity but, rather, from amnesia, anomie and
paralysis.
Still, like Furet, I don’t believe we have seen the end of history. Relations
of exploitation, alienation, and oppression continue to engender antagonisms
and conicts. And, though democratic aspirations have retreated, they persist
and promise to reassert themselves.
I realize that scholars committed to the newer historiographical currents –
widely referred to as postmodernist – would contest, if not utterly reject,
many of my assumptions and arguments. I remain resolutely Marxian and
radical democratic. I have never subscribed to Nietzschean ideas or values –
at least not consciously, for who has time for such things?
For those of us committed to democratic possibilities, our task remains
that of pursuing the historical education of desire, of cultivating and encour-
aging critical historical memory, consciousness and imagination. In other
words, we must advance what Antonio Gramsci called an ‘historical, dialec-
tical conception of the world’:
[One] which understands movement and change, which appreciates the sum of
effort and sacriŽce which the present has cost the past and which the future is
costing the present, and which conceives the contemporary world as a synthe-
sis of the past, of all past generations, which projects itself into the future.
(Gramsci 1971: 34–5)
 The British Marxist Historians 291

Clearly, we have to study the past afresh and write our own histories. We
have to develop fresh means of engaging our fellow citizens. And yet, as we
confront the powers, mystiŽcations, and illusions of the day, we would do
well to appreciate, if not emulate, the work of the British Marxist historians,
for they possessed the gift of which Benjamin wrote. They redeemed the lives
and struggles of those whose place in the making of history had been
neglected or denied. They revealed the ideas and aspirations which motivated
the diverse movements of the exploited and oppressed. They contested, and
helped to transform, the reigning grand narratives. And, in doing so, they
fanned the spark of hope in the past.
We should try to do as much. La lucha continua!
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Acknowledgement

This paper was presented as a plenary address to the Second International

Congress of “History under Debate”, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain,
July 14–18, 1999. I want to thank Professor Carlos Barros of the University
of Santiago for his invitation, interest and advice.

Notes

1 For radically different views of socialist and democratic possibilities, see Singer
(1999) and Bourdieu (1999).
2 The book instigated a vibrant debate on the question of the transition, reaching
well beyond the Historians’ Group. See Rodney Hilton (1976).
3 Torr edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846–1895 (London:
Lawrence, 1934) and authored Tom Mann and His Times (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1956). For a sampler of work produced by the Group in honor of Torr,
see John Saville (1954).
4 For example: Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1973),
The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1975),
and Class Conict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Hambledon Press, 1984);
Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg,
1958), Society and Puritanism in Prevolutionary England (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1964), and Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford
University Press, 1965); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution
(Oxford University Press, 1959), Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford University Press,
1962), The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964), Captain Swing with E.J.
Hobsbawm (New York: Pantheon, 1968), and The Face in the Crowd edited by
H.J. Kaye (London: Harvester, 1988); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels
(Manchester University Press, 1959), Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld, 1964),
and Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); E.P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963),
 292 Harvey J. Kaye

Whigs and Hunters (London: Allen Lane, 1975), and Customs in Common (New
York: New Press, 1991); John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist
Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and The Labour Movement in
Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1988); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (New
York: Pantheon, 1984); Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1972 rev.ed.), State and Society in Europe, 1550–1650 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), European Empires from Conquest to Collapse (New York:
Pantheon, 1982), and H.J. Kaye, ed., Imperialism and Its Contradictions (New
York: Routledge, 1995). For additional bibliographical references, see Kaye, The
British Marxist Historians and The Education of Desire.
5 For a rather different view of the class question, see David Cannidine, The Rise
and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). It
amazes me that after a generation of Thatcherism and Reaganism, that is, vigorous
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class war from above, historians and social scientists have taken to eschewing the
centrality of class and class conict in the modern world.
6 See George Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest (1980; University of North
Carolina Press, 1995) and Harvey J. Kaye, ‘Political Theory and History: Antonio
Gramsci and the British Marxist Historians’ in The Education of Desire, pp. 9–30.
Also, see for example: Christopher Hill, ed., The World Turned Upside Down
(1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and
Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Milton and the English Revol-
ution (London: Faber, 1977), and A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John
Bunyan and His Church (London: Allen Lane, 1988); and E.P. Thompson, William
Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955; New York: Pantheon, 1977), Persons
and Polemics (London: Merlin Press, 1994), Witness Against the Beast: William
Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1993), and The Romantics (new
York: New Press, 1997); and Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People (New York:
New Press, 1998).
7 In particular, one could Žnd the historians’ essays, commentaries and reviews in
the periodicals New Society, New Statesman, The London Review of Books,
Tribune, and Marxism Today. See David Rubinstein, ed., People for the People
(London: Ithaca Press, 1973) for a collection of biographical and movement
portraits by the historians and others which originally appeared as a series in
Tribune.
8 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld, 1962),
The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld, 1975), The Age of Empire,
1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), and The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991
(New York: Pantheon, 1995). Also, see Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York:
New Press, 1997), for a collection of his historiographical writings.
9 See Harvey J. Kaye, ‘E. P. Thompson, the British Marxist Historical Tradition and
the Contemporary Crisis’, in The Education of Desire, pp. 98–115. For examples
of Thompson’s most engaged writings, see Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin
Press, 1980), Protest and Survive, with other contributors (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980), and The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin Press, 1984).
 The British Marxist Historians 293

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