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thodox Marxist manner, Jones observed, for the rise in wages merely
disguised an increased "rate of exploitation"; people were "having to
work harder each hour," the result being the increase of industrial
disease, accidents, and deaths from exhaustion.
Defenders of the workshop's empirical methods insisted that the
people helped to make their own history, and were not mere puppets
of an economic determinism as depicted in traditional Marxist
theory. Raphael Samuel called attention to the workshop's Ruskin
College origins as an expression not so much of Marxism, but of
proletarian class consciousness. The journal's Marxism was "mainly
implicit," Samuel admitted, agreeing further that the workshop's
concern for local history, oral history, popular beliefs and customs,
and folk and industrial songs was populist in mood. But why, he
asked, should the far right have an exclusive claim to the "sense of
cultural loss" to which the expansion of the industrial system had
given rise? Samuel wished to avoid the esoteric theoretical discussions
of the younger Marxists and called for a non-sectarian Marxism. He
linked the orthodox Dobb's position to a Stalin-like economism from
which the culturalists, taking heart from the humanist writings of the
young Marx, had revolted.
Now, however, there is a major new effort to restore to intellec–
tual and political history their proper roles in illuminating the past.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of the most able historians of ideas of
our generation. She has written books on Acton, Darwin, and Mill,
and essays on many other eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers,
thinkers, and political figures, and each of her studies has opened
new ground. In the first of two projected volumes,
The Idea of Poverty,
Himmelfarb has joined intellectual to social history in what should
prove an example for social historians - if they can manage to escape
from the model that has recently come to dominate the field in both
England and America.
Himmelfarb is a neoconservative in her politics. Unlike the
Marxist social historians, she does not wish to provoke moral in–
dignation nor incite social revolution. She accepts technological ad–
vances and a market economy as having made possible a relative
plenitude for the laboring classes of the Western democracies. Him–
melfarb has disappointed critics on the left who hoped to discover in
this study by a prominent neoconservative a lack of proper sympathy
with the Victorian poor, or even a denial of the existence of poverty.
Without caricaturing its position or motives, she rejects the dismal
philosophy of a laissez-faire and Malthusian political economy,
