Bernard Semmel
TWO VIEWS OF SOCIAL HISTORY:
E. P. THOMPSON AND
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
In the author's preface to
Capital,
Marx says to the Ger–
man reader:
De tefabula narratur;
meaning, you think I am writing
only of England, but this will be your fate as well. That fate con–
sisted of the predictions of a growing immiseration in the living stan–
dards of the English working class, the growth of a revolutionary
proletariat, and the final conflict as a result of a conclusive economic
crisis. Some forty years before, T. R . Malthus had made a similar
prediction: not of a revolutionary proletariat, of course, but of a
growing impoverishment, as a result of population growth, and the
creation of what, in Marxist terms, would be the "industrial reserve
army" of the unemployed.
Few of these predictions materialized. And this created a vex–
ing problem for Marxist and socialist historians . The first answer
was that the English working class had been brutalized and made
passive by the decline in the standard of living. In the interwar
decades, the socialist journalists J.
L.
and Barbara Hammond, in a
number of influential books, pictured in passionate detail a wide–
spread deterioration in the conditions of agricultural and industrial
workers brought about by early industrial capitalism. In convincing
reply, the Oxford economic historian, Sir John Clapham, used
statistical evidence to demonstrate that, on the contrary, there had
been a clear rise in the wages of labor during this period and, despite
intermittent falls, the rise had been constant and real.
In the 1950s, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm turned the
issue from a "quantitative" to a "qualitative" one, arguing that
despite the increase in wages, there had been a decline in the quality
of working-class life; for example urban pollution had replaced rural
greenery, the mechanical clock supplanted the more benign natural
measure of the sun and the seasons, etc. What this also did, in effect,
was to shift the terrain of argument from an economic to a social
history, to the exploration of the life and character of the working
classes and society, an interesting turn for a Marxist writer.
Over the last two decades or so, social history has been the field
of major historical endeavor, and one of the critical problems has
