The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language: A Reply

Author(s): Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor

Source: Social History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 1-15
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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 ARGUMENT

Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor

The poverty of protest: Gareth

Stedman Jones and the politics of
language - a reply

In a recent article' David Mayfield and Susan Thorne have provided a critique of the
so-called linguistic turn in social history through a case-study of Gareth Stedman Jones's
Languages of Class.2 Mayfield and Thorne make a number of interrelated arguments.
They suggest that Stedman Jones's work is symptomatic of a trend, also to be found in the
recent work of PatrickJoyce,3 towards restoring politics to a central 'explanatoryrole in the
analysis of human affairs' (I65); that in Stedman Jones's case his conversion from
sympathy to antipathy towards a sociological perspective amounts to a simple inversion of
the premises behind his earlierwork on working-classculture; that much of the revisionist
work misunderstands the arguments of semiologists and deconstructionists on the relation
between social being and social consciousness; and, finally, that the way forwardfor social
historians lies not with the new 'revisionism', but in rediscovering the emphasis on agency
to be found originally in the work of Edward Thompson.4
Our criticism of Mayfield and Thorne is twofold. First, in our view, Mayfield and
Thorne have misconceived both the context of Languages of Class and its main aims. They
attribute to Languages of Class an argument concerning the determinacy of language and
politics in social history which is not really there. They do this partly by separating out the
theoretical claims of the book from the substantive empirical elements, and partly by
conflating Stedman Jones's work with the very different work of Patrick Joyce. Second,
like many others involved in the debate over Languages of Class, Mayfield and Thorne

a We are grateful to Jon Fulcher and Mike 1983).

Sonenscher for their comments on an earlier
draft of this reply.
' David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, 'Social
history and its discontents: Gareth Stedman
Jones and the politics of language', Social
History, xvii (May I992), 165-88.
2 Languages of Class: Studies in English
WorkingClass History, i 832-1982 (Cambridge,
3 Visions of the People: Industrial England
and the Question of Class, i84o-1914 (Cam-
bridge, i99I).
4
Principally in The Making of the English
Working Class (I963) and in his essay 'The
peculiarities of the English' (1965) reprinted in
Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other
Essays (I978).

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z SocialHistory VOL. i8: NO. I

have failed to respond to the important questions which Languages of Class sets for the
historical agenda of modern Britain. Their article contains no reference to the disparate
ways in which researchhas developed in the last decade testing, developing and modifying
Languages of Class empirically. In other words, by assuming that the debate is somehow
about political correctness in the Americanacademy or socialist politics in Thatcherite and
post-Thatcherite Britain they have missed the opportunity to take both social history and
political history into important new territory. It is not the social history project to which
the phrase 'plus (a change, plus c'est la me?mechose' should be applied, but the protests
which have accompanied every attempt in the last thirty years to take it further. It is here
that the real sense of dejti vu, to which Mayfield and Thorne allude, lies. To recall the
warnings of one of the editors of Social Histoty, who summarized the arguments then
taking place over Edward Thompson's Poverty of Theory, there is a danger of the debate
becoming the object of mutual delegitimizations along the lines alreadyfamiliarfrom
the I96os. So, perhaps strangely, when so many of the portents seemed favourable,
and when new integrations of theory into historical analysis are much speculated
about, there has been no such result.5
In our view, this note of alarmis as relevant now as it was over a decade ago. We fearthat as
long as the debate about Languages of Class is conducted in terms of a dispute between
dissenters and true believers over the question of methodological orthodoxy, then the
subject of social history itself is likely to atrophy. As we suggest in the first part of this
reply, Languages of Class was not intended as a discourse on method, but as an
intervention in a debate about the causes of historical change in modern Britain. In the
second part of our reply, we show the various ways during the last decade in which
empirical research, rather than theoretical disputation, has responded to the suggestions
and claims made in Languages of Class. Finally, we consider some of the difficulties with
Stedman Jones's formulations in Languages of Class, and suggest how these might be dealt
with as part of a reinvigorated social history project.

STEDMAN JONES: HISTORIES AND REPRESENTATIONS

Perhaps the most salutary warning of the dangers and pitfalls awaiting historians who
embark upon the analysis of language is to be found in the critical reception of Languages
of Class, published at the end of I983. Mayfield and Thorne's article is the latest in a long
line of reviews and critiques of Stedman Jones's work which misrepresent both the
intention and the content of the book. Languages of Class has been variously described as
an attack on the concept of class, as a call for a return to political history and the history of
ideas, and as an indication of the post-structuralistroute which social historians must now
take. Much of the blame for this confusion might be laid at Stedman Jones's own door.
Languages of Class does have something of a declamatory, 'young turk' tone, while at the
same time many of its theoretical suggestions are expressed elusively or formulated

I Keith Nield, 'A symptomatic dispute? and historical practice in Britain', Social Re-
Notes on the relation between Marxian theory search, XLVII (Autumn I980), 505-6.

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January 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply 3

inadequately.6 Furthermore, in his most recent work on similar themes, Stedman Jones
hiasnot really developed the ideas set out in Languages of Class, and has instead built on
the ratherdifferent implications of the 'invention of tradition'paradigmoriginally outlined
by Eric Hobsbawm and others.7 However, Languages of Class sought to stimulate
historical discussion, rather than promulgate a new credo. To describe Languages of
(U1ass, as Mayfield and Thorne do, as a statement or announcement of the 'new
revisionism' (i68) is to respond less to the work itself than to its subsequent misreadings
and misappropriations.
Mayfield and Thorne attribute an imperative character to Stedman Jones's ideas in
Languages of Class which belies the provisional manner in which they were put forward.
They do this partly by sub-editing Stedman Jones's own text,8 but mainly by
misunderstanding the nature of the broader historical debate from which Languages of
Class emerged. As several of Languages of Class's first reviewers noted, the book came as
an intervention in and a contribution to an ongoing debate.9Languages of Class developed
not only out of Stedman Jones's own interests, but also out of the debate conducted in
History Workshopand elsewhere concerning Edward Thompson's original work in The
Making of the English WorkingClass and in his later Poverty of Theo?y.'?This debate is
omitted entirely from Mayfield and Thorne's discussion, in which they suggest that the
debate between the old and new left - which Stedman Jones's work registers - was one

6 Robert Gray, 'The deconstructing of the
English working class', Social History, xI
(October 1986), 365; Peter Sch6ttler, 'His-
torians and discourse analysis', History Work-
shop, xxvii (Spring 1989), 46-7.
7 Stedman Jones, 'The cockney and the
nation, 1780o-988' in David Feldman and
Gareth Stedman Jones, Metropolis: Histories
and Representations since I8oo (I989), 278-9
and (with Raphael Samuel, 'Pearly kings and
queens' in Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The
Making and Unmaking of British National
Identity, 3 vols (I989), vOl. 3; cf. Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
8 Thus a paragraph in which Stedman Jones
states the provisional nature of his work on
Chartism, i.e.: 'In order, therefore, to bring to
the fore the politics of Chartism, freed from a
priori assumptions of historians about its social
meaning, I applied a non-referential conception
of language to the study of Chartistspeeches and
writings.. . . How well I succeeded in utilizing
the insights derived from such an approach in
the resulting essay, readers may judge' (Lan-
guages of Class, 2I) is read by Mayfield and
Thorne as follows: 'He [Stedman Jones] argues
that the analysis of Chartism must be freed from
"a priori assumptions ... about its social
meaning"' (I67).
9 Alun Howkins, 'Rethinking',
Statesman,3 FebruaryI984, 24-5; Tom Nairn,
'The remakingof a working class', Guardian, i6
February I984, 12; Gregory Claeys, 'Language,
class and historical consciousness in nineteenth
century Britain', Economy and Society, xiv
(MayI985), 239-63.
'0 The principal texts in this debate were:
Richard Johnson, 'Edward Thompson, Eugene
Genovese, and socialist-humanist history', His-
tory Workshop,vi (Autumn 1978), 79-0OO; the
contributions of Simon Clarke, Keith McClell-
and and Gavin Williams toHistory Workshop,vii
(Spring 1979), IO-24, and viii (Autumn
1979), 137-56; Thompson, The Poverty of
Theory, op. cit.; and Perry Anderson, Argu-
ments within English Marxism (I980). Stedman
Jones himself contributed to the debate: 'His-
tory and theory' (letter), History Workshop,viii
(Autumn1979), I98-202. The debatereached
an emotional climax at the History Workshop
conferencein Oxford in December 1979, for
which see Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's
History and Socialist Theory (1981), chaps
46-9. For reflections on and summaries of this
debate see: Gregor McLennan, Marxism and
the Methodologies of History (I983), I24-8;
Keith Nield and John Seed, 'Theoretical
poverty or the poverty of theory: British Marxist
historiographyand the Althusserians', Economy
and Society, viii (November 1979), 383-4I6
New and Nield, 'A symptomatic dispute', op. cit.

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4 Social History VOL. i8: NO. I

about false consciousness, the nature of working-class conservatism and the viability of a
socialist politics (i69-71). The debates surrounding Thompson c. 1978-9 were about
many things, but the question of false consciousness was not one of them, not because it
was deemed to be unimportant, but ratherbecause it had already preoccupied most social
historians during the I96os. 11By the late 1970s, the questions which were being addressed
to Thompson's work were very different. To what extent was Thompson's account of the
labour process in The Making of the English WorkingClass consistent with Marx'snotion
of exploitation? How adequately did Thompson's notion of 'experience'explain changes in
popular politics? Did it run the danger of collapsing all social and labour history into a
romantic populism? To what extent did a 'history from below' need to be supplemented by
a 'history from above' in which the activities of the state and the role of ideology were given
a greater prominence?'2Among British historians, the debate over the 'labouraristocracy'
acted as a focus for some of these questions and, in the process, pushed those involved into
discussions about the aftermathof Chartism, the problem of contemporaryterminologies
and languages of labour and class and, more generally, the relationship between economic
and social change in the mid-nineteenth century. 13 Now, whether or not these criticisms of
Thompson's work and this preoccupation with the labour aristocracywere justified, it is
misleading to locate Languages of Class without any reference to this historiographical
context.
Stedman Jones's work in the early I98os, culminating in Languages of Class, built on
and extended this debate. There was no attempt to refute Thompson for his 'residual
economic reductionism', as Mayfield and Thorne suggest (I84).14 Rather, as Stedman
Jones explained in 'Rethinking Chartism':
The great achievement of Thompson's book is to have freed the concept of class
consciousness from any simple reduction to the development of productive forces
measured by the progress of large-scale industry and to have linked it to the
development of a political movement which cannot be reduced to the terminology of
" For a discussion of this, see C. Lin, 'The Aristocracy"', Bulletin of the Society for the
British New Left, 1957-77', (unpublished Study of Labour History, xxxvii (Autumn
Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, I989), 1978), 51-67; Keith McClelland, 'Skilled
66-7. workers on Tyneside, x850-i875', ibid., XLI
12 Tony Judt, 'A clown in regal purple', (Spring I980), 8-9; Alastair Reid, 'Intelligent
History Workshop, vii (Spring I979), 66-94; artisans and aristocrats of labour: the essays of
Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, 'Why does social Thomas Wright' in J. M. Winter (ed.), The
history ignore politics', Social History, v (I 980), Working Class in Modern British History:
249-71; Geoff Eley, 'Rethinking the political: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge,
social history and political culture in eighteenth I983), 17I-86; John Field, 'British historians
and nineteenth century Britain', Archiv fur and the concept of the labour aristocracy',
Sozialgeschichte, XXI (I98I), 427-57; John Radical History Review, xix (Winter 1978-9),
Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable 6i-85.
People: The English and their Law in the 14 Others have done this: William Sewell has
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (I98o). argued that a residual reductionism is evident in
13 H. Moorhouse, 'The Marxist theory of the Thompson's break with economistic Marxism:
labour aristocracy', Social History, III (1978), 'How classes are made: critical reflections on E.
6i-82; Alastair Reid, 'Politics and economics in P. Thompson's theory of working-class for-
the formation of the British working class', ibid., mation' in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClell-
III (1978), 347-6i; M. A. Shepherd, 'The and (eds), E. P. Thompson:Critical Perspectives
origins and incidence of the term "Labour (Cambridge, 1990), 50-77.

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7anuary 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply 5

incoherent protest. To have established this connection is a vital advance. But we

must go further. Thompson's concept of class consciousness still assumes a relatively
direct relationship between 'social being' and 'social consciousness' which leaves little
independent space to the ideological context within which the coherence of a
particularlanguage of class can be reconstituted.15
The possible relevance of linguistic analysis to this problem was heralded in the editorial
preface to the Autumn I980 edition of History Workshopentitled 'Language and history'
(written by Michael Ignatieff, Raphael Samuel and Stedman Jones), where it was argued
that attention to language would illustrate some of the complexity surrounding 'the
relationship between "social being" and "social consciousness"'.16Crucially, this preface
also made clear that although structural linguistics might help to demonstrate that
language was not simply a reference to external reality, but a system in itself, there was no
need to embrace much of its subsequent 'inflation' by deconstructionists into 'an
anti-system challenging the very possibility of objective knowledge'. In other words, the
recourse to language analysis was not offered as a new orthodoxy, but as a novel attempt to
deal with problems recognized by everyone involved in the debates surrounding The
Poverty of Theory. Significantly, much of the theoretical anxiety surrounding Stedman
Jones's engagement with linguistic theory was instigated by John Foster - someone whose
own commitment to orthodox Marxism precluded any involvement in the debates
concerning the relationship between social history and politics in the late 1970s.s7
Mayfield and Thorne's contention that Languages of Class constitutes a manifesto for
the new 'revisionism' rests not only on a misunderstanding of the debates which were
taking place within social history in the late 1970s, but also on a failure to recognize the
long-term continuities in Stedman Jones's work. Central to their reading of Languages of
Class is the idea that 'Stedman Jones's theoretical framework underwent a striking
reversal' in the early ig8os. They argue that he switched from understanding popular
political movements in terms of their 'sociological imperatives' (the approachtaken by his
'Working-classculture' article) to analysing them in terms of the 'formal content of [their]
political discourse' (the 'Rethinking Chartism'piece) (I73). While 'Rethinking Chartism'
does represent a new phase in Stedman Jones's work, in our view it is not a 'reversal',rather
it represents a new stage in Stedman Jones's long-term preoccupation with the complexity
of the relationship between social and political change.18 Just as Stedman Jones's work
cannot be read as political or linguistic determinism now, neither can it be read as having

Languages of Class, I OI.

'5
16'Editorial: Language and history', History
Workshop, x (Autumn 1980), i-5. The com-
plexity of this relationship was also referredto in
Samuel and Stedman Jones's editorial preface to
the festschrift for Eric Hobsbawm: Culture,
Ideologyand Politics: Essays forF,nc Hobsbawm
(I983), x.
17 John Foster, 'The declassing of language',
New Left Review, CL (March-April 1985),
29-45.
18 Mayfield and Thorne's argument that there
was a fundamental shift from the precepts of
'Working-class culture' to those of 'Rethinking
Chartism' again stems partly from a failure to
read Stedman Jones's text properly. Thus
Stedman Jones's own reflection on 'Working
class culture', i.e. 'One reason for this underesti-
mation of the political was that I did not possess
a clear conception of the limits of social
explanation, i.e. in what senses the political
could not be inferred from the social' (Lan-
guages of Class, ii) is read by Mayfield and
Thorne as '[h]is "Workingclass culture" article
was committed, he admits, to infer the political
from the social' (i85).

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6 Social History VOL. i8: NO. I

been sociological determinism in the past. The problem of how to relatesocial and political
change to one another (and, equally significantly, whether they are synchronous or
mutually interactive at all times) has been central to Stedman Jones's work since the I96os.
In one of his earliest review articles, Stedman Jones argued that
History will remain meaningless and trivial unless the historian can grasp its ongoing
dialectic - between thought and action, between consciousness and reality, between
intention and event. 19
The extent to which language was part of this dialectic has been pivotal to Stedman
Jones's concerns from the early stages of his work. The opening sentence of his first
published work, Outcast London, suggests that 'Changes in the use of language can often
indicate important turning points in social history',20 and while this sentence perhaps
implies that language has a reflexive rather than a constructive function, it does at least
demonstrate that Stedman Jones was aware in I970 of the problems posed for social
historians by language and political ideology. A similar concern emerged from Stedman
Jones's work in the mid-1970s on Engels, in which he sought to understand Engels's failure
to adapt his understanding of British industrial society in the early 1840s to the changed
vista at mid-century. In a sentence which anticipates his later comments on the survival of
the eighteenth-century radicalcritique of the state into the Chartist years, Stedman Jones
noted that 'a theory, however ultimately inappropriate, is more likely to be stretched and
forced to take account of new phenomena than to be abandoned'.2'
Thus Stedman Jones's earlier work hardly embodies the purely 'sociological' approach
which Mayfield and Thorne suggest, but instead demonstrates an attempt to maintain a
balance between social and political history. The 'Working-class culture' essay did not
'read off' the politics of the metropolitan working class from the social structure of the
capital in the late nineteenth century, so much as indicate why developments in the social
sphere found relatively little resonance in formal politics. In so far as the essay can be said
to exaggerate the apolitical nature of working-class culture, this is the result, not of any
residual adherence to notions of true and false consciousness, but of its narrow definition
of the 'political', which is equated with the activities of formal political organizations. Here
one again finds strong continuities with Stedman Jones's later work, with its emphasis on
the ways in which political organizations such as the Chartist movement or the Labour
party have sought to construct political constituencies out of heterogeneous social groups.
This does not amount to 'political determination' (Mayfield and Thorne, I68), or arguing
for the autonomy of politics,22but is rathera recognition of the contested and constructive
role of argument and ideas in the establishment of successful political strategies.
The second main theme which is evident throughout Stedman Jones's work and which
vitiates the notion of Languages of Class representing a shift from a sociological to a

19'History in one dimension', New Left
Review, xxxvi (March-April I966), 57.
20 Outcast London (I971), V.
21 'Engels and the genesis of Marxism', New
Left Review, cvI (November-December 1977),
104.
22 As suggested by Ellen Meiskins Wood, The
Retreat from Class: The New 'True' Socialism
(I986), chap. 7 and Neville Kirk, 'In defence of
class: a critique of recent revisionist writing
upon the nineteenth-century English working
class', International Review of Social History,
xxxii (I987), 2-47-

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7anuary1993 The poverty of protest - a reply 7

political perspective, has been his critique of modernization theory. Mayfield and Thorne
treat Stedman Jones's work on Chartism as though it were simply a theoretical conversion
uninformed by any wider empirical research. But his reappraisalof Chartism followed on
from a reassessment of the nature of early industrial European society. In his work on
Marxism, Stedman Jones has often pointed out that the character of social and economic
change in nineteenth-century Europe did not bear much relation to that described or
predicated by Marx and Engels.23Before completing'Rethinking Chartism', both in his
own work on utopian socialism, and as a participant in the political economy project at
King's College, Cambridge, Stedman Jones had been critical of the idea that the shift
towards capitalist society engendered a specific language of capitalist political economy or
an alternative language of socialism.24More specifically, in relation to popular protest and
industrialization, he had written a series of critiques of historical sociologists such as
Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly and Eric Wolf, who correlated social movements in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe with shifts from pre-industrial to industrial
society.25 Citing recent work by economic historians, Stedman Jones demonstrated that
there could be no simple correlation between protest and industrialization because of the
uneven pattern of industrialchange. Although not made explicit in 'Rethinking Chartism',
Stedman Jones's dissatisfaction with the socio-economic explanation of Chartism built on
this critique of modernization theory, and stemmed from the realization that British
industrialization had not created a homogeneous working class - nor had it even disrupted
the artisanal and manufacturing sections of the population in the catastrophic manner
assumed by earliergenerations of labour and social historians. Mayfield and Thorne fail to
recognize the significance of this new gradualist picture of British industrial growth for
studies of early nineteenth-century radicalism.26Hence they assert that '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' (I 74), when it is precisely because Chartism did not coincide
with the Industrial Revolution in the sense that they suggest that we have to look for new
ways of approaching the subject. Here is a classic case, exemplified throughout Mayfield
and Thorne's argument, of ensnaring Stedman Jones the theoretician, by filtering out the
important arguments of Stedman Jones the historian.
Mayfield and Thorne's case for seeing Languages of Class as a statement of the new
revisionism is bolstered considerably by comparing Stedman Jones's work with the recent
work of Patrick Joyce. Joyce's book, according to Mayfield and Thorne, 'begins with an
23 Stedman Jones, 'Society and politics at the the Scottish E,nlightenment(Cambridge, I983).
beginning of the world economy', Cambridge Both these concerns were signalled in the I980
Journal of Economics, I (I977), 77-92; 'Engels 'Language and history' editorial in History
and the history of Marxism' in E. Hobsbawm Workshop.
(ed.), History of Marxism, vol. I (Brighton 25 Stedman Jones, 'Barrington Moore on
I982), 290-326; 'Some notes on Karl Marx and injustice', Historical _ournal, XXIII (I980),
the English Labour movement', History Work- 1003-7; 'The mid-century crisis and the 1848
shop, xviii (Autumn I984), I24-37. revolutions: a critical comment', Theory and
24 Stedman Jones, 'Utopian socialism recon- Society, XII (I983), 505-I9.
sidered' in Samuel (ed.), People's History, op. ' Explored further by Stedman Jones in his
cit. 138-44. For the King's College project see recent 'The changing face of 19th-century
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth Britain', History Today (May I991I), 36-40.
and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in

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8 Social History VOL. I8: NO. I

extended tribute to Languages of Class and the agendas of the two books parallel nicely'
(I76-7). In our view this is mistaken, and in linking Stedman Jones's work to the work of
Joyce, much of the theoretical and empirical importanceof Languages of Class is in danger
of being distorted. Quite where Joyce's 'extended tribute' to Stedman Jones is to be found
in Visions of the People is unclear. Joyce first mentions Stedman Jones and Languages of
Class on page I o, where he notes that
this work has been rightly criticized for its formalistic account of political language
and for its lack of attention to the contexts in which class languages are used. In many
respects, despite its bracing effect, it does not go very far either with languageor class.
However it does begin to suggest alternatives to the notion of class, even though its
account of these is not far developed.
Joyce has expressed this view of Languages of Class as formalistic and undeveloped
elsewhere,27 and it can hardly be construed as a 'tribute' to Stedman Jones. Moreover,
whatever Joyce's claims, the agendas of Languages of Class and Visionsof the People do not
significantly overlap. Joyce himself has 'developed'Languages of Class in an idiosyncratic
manner, seeing it as a definitive rejection of the utility of the concept of class to
understanding nineteenth-century social relations, and detecting in 'RethinkingChartism'
not class but 'the presence of a powerful populism'.28 But Stedman Jones was not
attempting to replace one uniform concept - 'class' - with another - the 'people' - a term
which creates all sorts of methodological problems of its own, particularlywhen it is placed
within paradigms of 'plebeian-patrician', or 'high-low', culture, as it is in Visionsof the
People.29Moreover, Joyce's work remains locked within some fairly orthodox approaches.
The distinction which he draws between class awareness and class consciousness in
Victorian England echoes the argument made by John Vincent (a much more formative
influence on Joyce than Stedman Jones) in his Pollbooks;3() and his emphasis on working
people 'making' their own culture by deploying the 'master-narrative'of the constitution
repeats the central argument of Edward Thompson's Making of the English Working
Class.31 Overall, Mayfield and Thorne's introduction of Joyce's work into their critique of
Stedman Jones is something of a red herring. Languages of Class in general and
'Rethinking Chartism' in particular sought to explicate the interrelationship between
social and political forces in modern Britain, whereas Joyce has come close to denying that
any such relationship exists.32
27 Joyce, 'In search of the proletarians',Times 3' Thompson, Making of the English Working
Literary Supplement, ix May I984, 532;'Work' Class, op. cit. especially the chapter on the
in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge 'free-born Englishman'.
Social History of Modern Britain, 1750-I950 32 'There is no overarching coherence evident
(1990), vol. 2, I93. in either the polity, the economy or the social
2 Joyce, Visionsof the People, op. cit., IO. system. What there are are instances (texts,
29 In a fairly well-known unpublished seminar events, ideas and so on) that have social contexts
paper Stedman Jones has criticized this com- which are essential to their meaning, but there is
partmentalist approach to cultural history: no underlying structure to which they can be
'History, political change and popular culture referred as expressions or effects': Joyce,
from xSoo to the present day' (x988). 'History and post-modernism', Past and
30 Joyce, Visionsof the People, op. cit., 332; cf. Present, cxxxiii (November 1991), zo8; cf.
J. R. Vincent, Pollbooks:How VictonransVoted Visions of the People, i6. See the reply by
(Cambridge, I967), 29. Lawrence Stone in Past and Present, cxxxv

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January 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply 9

RETHINKING
In our opinion Mayfield and Thorne's article not only misunderstands both the meaning
and context of Languages of Class, but is also mistaken in assuming that this whole debate
is primarily about theoretical orthodoxy or revisionism. Perhaps the greatest failure of
their article is its refusal to engage with any of the significant empirical and historical
problems which Languages of Class has laid bare. These include the timing of Chartism,
the ideological origins of mid-Victorian liberalism and the structural constraints facing
twentieth-century Labour party politics. Mayfield and Thorne point out that this is not
their concern - rather, they are interested in 'the conceptualization of politics, language
and society which informs [Stedman Jones's] critique of social historical practice' (I69).
We would argue that you cannot have one without the other. It is precisely at the empirical
level that the importance of the theoretical speculations of Languages of Class lies and
where the debate should be conducted. Throughout his work, Stedman Jones's own
attitude towards theoretical innovation has been one of, as he has put it, 'ons'engage etpuis
on voit' or, in other words, 'the question which we must pose to such theories is what can
they actually explain'.33The test to which Languages of Class should therefore be put is
whether hypotheses about the constitutive properties of language, or about the
continuities of political idioms across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or about the
institutional context of popular politics can be tested empirically. Mayfield and Thorne do
not rise to this challenge - even their reformulationof Thompson's notion of 'agency'is not
concluded with any pointers as to the sort of historical research agenda it might instigate.
Nor do they refer to any of the substantial work which other historians have been carrying
out since I983 - work which does engage with Languages of Class, not as part of some
gladiatorialcombat over theory, but as so many discrete contributions to an emergent new
view of the dynamics of political and social change in modern Britain.
Even those who disagree with or who are sceptical about the theoretical content of
Languages of Class have at least followed Stedman Jones's dictum and carried forwardthe
debate at an empirical level. For example, although historians of Chartism and early
nineteenth-century radicalism such as James Epstein and Paul Pickering still understand
the overall character of popular politics in this period as based on some form of class
consciousness, rooted in the experience of exploitation or political exclusion, in engaging
with Stedman Jones their work has become sensitive to the ritualistic and symbolic
functions of language, and the multifarious ways in which notions of rights, liberty and the
English constitution were understood by contemporaries.34The effect of this develop-
ment has been that by paying more careful attention to the form and content of the
language of popular politics during the first half of the nineteenth century, historians have
begun to create a more rounded picture of the contours of national political culture. This is
not an old 'high' political history returningto taunt the diehard social historians, but one in

(May 1992), I90. Joyce's claim amounts to the ment', Past and Present, cxii (I986), I44-62;
'anti-system challenging the very possibility of James Epstein, 'Understanding the cap of
objective knowledge' warned of by the History liberty', ibid., cxxii (1989), 75-1 I8; and
Workshopeditorial in I980. 'Radical dining, toasting and symbolic ex-
3' Languagesof Class, i I, 87. pression in early nineteenth-century Lan-
Paul Pickering, 'Class without words?:
34 cashire', Albion, xx (Summer I988), 271-91 .
symbolic communication in the Chartist move-

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io SocialHistory VOL. i8: NO. I

which constitutional history and the history of popular movements are in a happierstate of
equilibrium.
Languages of Class has also stimulated a discussion about the chronology of popular
politics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By divorcing Chartism from the
social and economic backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, Stedman
Jones has not only demonstrated the basic continuity of eighteenth-century radicalideas -
particularly the critique of 'old Corruption'- he has also specified why that critique was
apposite in the decade following the first Reform Act. This emphasis on the radical
political character of Chartism has had two main effects. First, it has freed the study of
radical thinkers and radical movements in the 1790-i850 period from simplistic
assumptions about the connection between social tension, protest and ideology, and
enabled historians of radicalmovements to understand neglected areasof radicalism, such
as religion and atheism, and constitutional and commercial theory.35 Second, it has
relocated the study of radical and popular politics, releasing it from the chronologies and
concepts established by a discredited economic history and reconnecting it to the larger
themes of administrative change, state policy and party ideology. In this way Stedman
Jones's account of the rise and fall of the Chartist critique of the state has been perfectly
complemented by Peter Mandler'srecent history of the high profile, interventionist Whig
governments of the same period.36Moreover, this new emphasis on the wider political
context of radicalism and popular movements has inspired a series of works which
reinterpret the transition from Chartism in the I840S to the liberalismand socialism of the
later nineteenth century.37Far from simply retreatinginto the safer territoryof radicalism,
as Mayfield and Thorne imply (I69, n. 8), these studies are concerned with re-examining
many of the crucial turning points in the history of nineteenth-century popular
movements.
It is not only the 'Rethinking Chartism' essay which suggests new directions for the
development of modern British history. Taken in conjunction with 'Why is the Labour
party in a mess?', Languages of Class emphasizes the powerful role of the state, political
parties, trade unions and other formal institutions in defining the terrain and context of
popular culture and politics. In this respect Stedman Jones's argumentsshould be seen as
part of a more general reaction against portrayingpolitical institutions, including the state,
as a direct reflection of underlying social realities.38Thus Alastair Reid has stressed the

3l lain McCalman, Radical Underworld: i85o-19I4 (Cambridge, I991 ); Biagini,

Prophets,Revolutionaries and Pornographersin Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular
London, I 795-1 840 (Cambridge, I988); Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, s86o-i88o
Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics (Cambridge, 1992); Jon Lawrence, 'Popular
and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism radicalism and the socialist revival in Britain',
(Cambridge, I989); and Thomas Paine: Social Journal of British Studies, xxxi (April I992),
and Political Thought (I989); Malcolm Chase, I 63-86; Miles Taylor, 'Radicalism and Patriot-
The People's Farm: Fnglish Radical Agrarian- ism, i848-i859' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
ism, I 775-l 840 (Oxford,I988). University of Cambridge, I989).
36 Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Governmentin 38 Much of this literature is acknowledged by
the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1832- Mayfield and Thorne, but it is seen merely as so
1852 (Oxford, I990). many branches of 'the new revisionism'. The
37 Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid (eds), historical significance of this rethinking of many
Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, of the orthodoxies of the social history project is
Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, never recognized: Mayfield and Thorne, i65-6.

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January 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply II

importance of trade union and Labour party strategies designed to construct a basis for
political unity among heterogeneous groups of workers whose powerlessness in the labour
market could often encourage disunity or even intra-class conflict.39 In turn Duncan
Tanner has demonstrated the dangers of treating political parties as ideological or
organizational monoliths, by emphasizing their responsiveness to (but not determination
by) varied local social and political contexts,40 while Jonathan Zeitlin has argued that
labour history must recognize that 'institutional forces', rather than 'informal groups and
spontaneous social and economic processes' have been largely responsible for shaping
relations between workers and employers at the workplace.41 Here, however, the
legitimate concern to reassertthe independent and creative role of institutions threatens to
become a full-blown attackon the legacy of 'history from below', ratherthan an attempt to
resituate that legacy.
Finally, some historians have suggested ways in which a language-centred approach
might be used to explore traditional social history topics such as the labour process, the
effects of rapid commercial and industrial change and the sexual division of labour. Robert
Gray has explored the complexity and open-ended nature of discourses focusing on the
factory.42 In his work on the sans-culottes and on the compagnonnages, Michael
Sonenscher has shown ways in which particular political contexts can make the everyday
language of the workshop, theatre or courts more apposite, and how older meanings can be
grafted onto or interwoven with newer ones.43 In her reflections on Stedman Jones's
'Rethinking Chartism', Joan Scott has argued that the predominant focus of Chartism on
the issue of adult male suffrage actually contributed to the gendering of political discourse
in nineteenth-century Britain." None of these studies embraces 'linguistic determinism',
rather they demonstrate the complex and ambiguous interaction of language and social
structure.

Alastair Reid, 'Politics and economics in the bridge, I987), 143-79-

formation of the British working class'; 'Re-
sponse', Social History, IV(I 979); 'The division
of labour and politics in Britain, I880-I920', in
W. J. Mommsen and H. G. Husung (eds), The
Development of Trade Unionism in Great
Brntain and Germany, 1880-1914 (I985),
I5o-65 and 'Glasgow socialism', Social History,
xi (I986), 89-97-
40Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the
Labour Party, IgOo-1918 (Cambridge, I990);
'Political history and labour history', Labour
History Review, LV (I 990), 12-14.
41 Jonathan Zeitlin, 'From labour history to
the history of industrial relations', Economic
History Review, 2nd series, XL (I987), 159-84,
esp. 159-60.
42 Robert Gray, 'The languages of factory
reform in Britain, c. I 830-i 860' in PatrickJoyce
(ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cam-
13 Michael Sonenscher, 'The sans culottes of
Year II: rethinking the language of labour in
revolutionary France', Social History, IX
(I984), 30I-28; 'Mythical work: workshop
production and the compagnonnages of eight-
eenth-century France' in Joyce (ed.), Historical
Meanings of Work,3 I-63; and Workand Wages:
Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-
century French Trades (Cambridge, i989),
chap. io.
* Joan Scott, 'On language, gender and
working-class history', International Labor and
Working Class History, xxxi (Spring I987),
1-13. For a recent investigation of the creative
and varied discourses of gender within the
language of Chartism see Anna Clark, 'The
rhetoric of Chartist domesticity: gender, lan-
guage and class in the I830s and I84os',Jour-nal
of British Studies, xxxi (January I992), 6z-88.

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12 SocialHistory VOL. I8: NO. I

BEYOND LANGUAGES OF CLASS

If Stedman Jones has shifted his ground, it is not that he has moved from a sociological to a
purely political perspective. It is much more serious than that. Languages ofClass signifies
the dimming and final expiration of his belief in Marxism, not as a form of socialist politics,
as Mayfield and Thorne suggest, but as a self-sufficient science of historical explanation.
As Stedman Jones himself has acknowledged, and as his early writings on historiography
and on the history of Marxism attest, he was drawn to both the Annales school and to
Althusserian Marxism as a form of holistic explanation.45These two different approaches
offered the tools with which the structures of specific societies (such as mid- and late
Victorian London) or specific conjunctures (such as the 183os and 1840s), could be
analysed in their totality. However, this type of holistic approach was essentially
parasitical. It required that social historians should also be economists, sociologists and
anthropologists. Throughout the I970s, Stedman Jones voiced his fear that Marxist
historiography, particularly in the guise of modern social science, was becoming too
dependent on the paradigmsand functionalist concepts derived from ancillarydisciplines,
such as sociology, economic history and idealist philosophy.46
The introduction to Languages of Class attests to this crisis of identity which social
history (particularlyof the nineteenth century) was facing by the early I98os, and the book
itself might be seen as an attempt to retain a holistic approachto the subject by suggesting
that language can offer the ultimate key to understanding the dynamics of social change.47
But regardlessof how one views Stedman Jones's solution to the problem, the implications
of this identity crisis are profound for all social historians. The real 'discontent'of modern
social history has been not so much the threat of the 'linguistic turn' as the complete
collapse of the subject's totalizing ambition and the beginning of the retreatinto specialist
subdisciplines, such as demography, the history of the family, urban history and the
history of industrial relations. Moreover, the fact that this crisis finds only the faintest
echoes outside the modern period demonstrates the extent to which the original project of
modern social history was structured around the now problematic concepts of a
promethean Industrial Revolution and its supposed consequences - a mature, class-based
society and polity.48 Apparently unaware of the historiographical challenge mounted
against these foundations of the original social history project, Mayfield and Thorne fail to
suggest how the subject might regain its self-confidence and ambition. Their solution - a
reiterationof Edward Thompson's emphasis on agency and mobilization- cannot stand in
for the required redefinition of the subject of modern social history.
By focusing on the questions of 'agency'and 'mobilization', Mayfield and Thorne signal
a legitimate concern that the great strength of 'history from below' - its insistence on
'self-making'- is in danger of being lost in the rush to highlight the creative role of formal

45 Stedman Jones, Outcast London (I984
edn), preface, xii-xiv; 'History: the poverty of
empiricism', New Left Review, XLVI (I967),
reprinted in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in
Social Science (I 972), 96-115.
46Stedman Jones, 'The Marxism of the early
Lukacs', New Left Review, LXX (November-
December 1971), 63; 'From historical sociology
to theoretical history', British Journal of So-
ciology, xxvii (September 1976), 295-305;
'Class expression versus social control?' in
Languages of Class, 76-89.
L7 anguages of Class, 4-7.
48 On this see Stedman Jones's review of F.
M. L. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge Social
History of Modern Britain, Economic History
Review, 2nd series XLIV (November 1991), 731 .

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January 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply I3

organizations and their political discourses. Once again, however, their arguments are
abstract and ahistorical. Nowhere do they confront the crucial issue of how 'history from
below' can be reintegrated into an historical project which is sensitive to the wider context
of state policy, national politics and institutional organization. And nowhere do they
recognize that historians championing a renewed emphasis on politics have themselves
been committed to exploring the nature and limits of human agency in their work on trade
unionism and local political activism.49
That said, the place of 'history from below', and indeed 'the social' more generally, often
seems distinctly precariousin Languages of Class. First, Languages of Class pays too little
attention to the constraints on formal political discourse. As others have noted, Stedman
Jones adopts a narrowdefinition of political discourse which tends to equate it with formal
bodies of political ideas, wedded together in more or less coherent public ideologies.50In
turn these ideologies are strongly linked to the fortunes of major political organizations
such as the Chartist movement or the Labour party. There is little recognition that party
political discourses do not exist in a vacuum, and that to succeed they must engage with,
and to some extent, echo, pre-existing beliefs and aspirations. In other words, Languages
of Class underestimates the problem of reception for a language-based analysis of politics.
Its emphasis is overwhelmingly on the creative, innovatory power of formal political
discourses, rather than on the complex, mutually transforming relationship between
political languages and the informal lived discourses through which people understand
their lives and the world around them. These more intimate and localized discourses may
derive from any number of sources - occupational or leisure cultures, for example, or the
language of the law - but what is important is that they all mediate the ways in which
national and formalized political agendas are understood and appropriated. Moreover,
there is little recognition in Languages of Class of language as a form of argument, having
social and political consequences many of which may be unforeseen.5' In this sense,
Stedman Jones underestimates the contingency of politics, exaggerating the logic of
political history by focusing on willed intentions, rather than unwilled outcomes.
Politicians may misread social and structuralchange,52 or develop political agendas which,
although successful in the short term, create unimagined pressures or new opportunities in
the longer term.53
49 For instance, see A. Reid, 'Politics and published Ph.D. thesis, University of Cam-
economics' op. cit. and D. Tanner, Political bridge, I989); or in the case of the Labour
Change and the Labour Party op. cit.. party's attitude towards affluence and youth
SOGray, 'The deconstructing of the English culture during the I950s: Nick Tiratsoo,
working class', op. cit. esp. 367-8. Acknow- 'Popularpolitics, affluence and the Labour party
ledged by Stedman Jones in his Klassen, Politik in the I950S' in A. Gorst et al. (eds),
und Sprache: fur eine theorieorientiertesozial- Contemporary British History, iq931-1 961
geschichte, (Munster, }988), 312-I 3. (I99I), 44-6I.
SI See B. Hindess, "'Interests" in political 53 For example, the short-term impact of the
analysis' in J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Napoleonic Wars was to increase the power of
Belief: A New SociologyofKnowledge? (London, the state and to circumscribe the purchase of
I 986: Sociological Review Monograph, 32). popular radicalism by introducing a simple test
52 As has been argued in the case of the way in of loyalty and patriotism. But in the long term
which the Liberal party lost its hold on urban this gave radicalisma new legitimacy in the guise
political loyalties in late nineteenth-century of the defence of the 'ancient constitution':
Britain: Jon Lawrence, 'Party Politics and the Linda Colley, 'Whose nation?', Past and
People: Continuity and Change in the Political Present, cxiii (November I986), 97-1 i8.
History of Wolverhampton, i815-1914' (un-

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14 Social History VOL. i8: NO. I

Second, this failure to examine questions of reception and contingency in relation to

political discourse is symptomatic of the more general failure of Languages of Class to
reconceptualize 'the social'. Stedman Jones's understandable frustration with the
problems of social explanation has resulted in a reluctanceto embi ace any detailed analysis
of social structure and social forces. Having asserted that the relationship between
structural change and politics 'can never be established with any satisfying degree of
finality',54Stedman Jones concludes that it would be best for the historian to begin with
politics and the state and work down:
between the changing character of social life and the order of politics there is no
simple, synchronous or directly transitive line of connection, either in one direction
or the other. To begin at the other end of the chain does not obliterate the significance
of the work of the social historian, but locates its significance in a different
perspective.55
While this passage clearly rejects any notion of simple linguistic or political determinism, it
does seem to marginalizethe concerns of historianswho are interested in social change and
cultural relations.56 It may be that Stedman Jones's approach only really works as an
explanation of how political movements such as Chartism and the Labour party have used
rhetoric to forge political alliances among heterogeneous social groups.57 But since
Languages of Class has frequently been read by both its champions and its detractorsas a
blueprint for understanding social change more generally, it is important to insist that a
reinvigoratedmodern social history needs to go further than Stedman Jones seems to allow
in addressing the question of social identity and social structure. Fortunately, some of the
recent responses of historians to the crisis of social history are alreadybeginning to suggest
the broad lines along which this process might develop. At an empirical level there is now
more awareness of the dangers of deploying inappropriate models of social class or class
consciousness drawn uncritically from the social sciences. Emphasis is now placed on the
heterogeneity of social groups, and the inherent fuzziness of any nominally objective
system of social classification, while greater attention is also being paid to the specific
contexts within which languages of class have emerged.58 The problematic nature of
understanding shared experiences of exploitation and struggle in terms of pre-given
categories of 'class' or 'class consciousness' is now widely recognized, and non-class forms

54 Languages of Class, 22. social would have to be, in this context,

55 ibid., 24. resituated within discursive relations: ibid., 23.
56 Particularlywhen read in conjunction with 5 Meiskins Wood, Retreatfrom Class, I 14.

the following passage: 'Of course, social and
structural changes in twentieth-century
England are of fundamental importance and no
discussion of politics, labour or otherwise, could
proceed in ignorance of them. But from the
vantage point of the history of the Labour party,
it is not these changes themselves that matter.
What matters are which of these changes are
articulated and how, within the successive and
various discourses which have co-existed within
the Labour party, or which have impinged upon
it or threatened it from outside. The place of the
5 Steven Wallech, 'Class versus rank: the
transformation of eighteenth-century English
social terms and theories of production', 7ournal
of History of Ideas, XLVII (July-September
I986); Geoffrey Crossick, 'From gentleman to
residuum: languages of social description in
Victorian Britain' in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.),
Language, History and Class (Oxford, I99I);
M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social
Classes in Europe since *5oo (Harlow, I992);
Alastair Reid, Social Classes and Social Re-
lations in Britain, r 85o-1 914 (1992).

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January 1993 The poverty of protest - a reply I5

of social identity, such as gender, ethnicity, religion and locality are receiving much
greater attention.59
However, although welcome, this 'deconstruction' of class has tended to accentuate the
fracturing of social history as a subject. By emphasizing the complexity and relative
contingency of social identity and social structure, historians have discouraged the
production of ambitious, overarching interpretations of social and political change
comparable to those liberal and Marxist studies which were based on the Industrial
Revolution and the rise of class society. This is very much a problem for historians of
nineteenth-century Britainand one which Stedman Jones'sLanguages of Class was among
the first to address. At present there are few indications that historical study of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is about to yield comprehensive reinterpretations of
British history on the same scale as the recent work of Brewer and Langford on the
eighteenth century or Cronin on the twentieth.60 Given this vacuum, it is all the more
regrettable that the agenda of social history should continue to be set by polemical protest
ratherthan informed historical enquiry.
University College,London
and
Christ's College, Cambridge

59 See, variously, David Feldman, 1707-1837 (1992); J. C. D. Clark, English

E'nglishmen andJews, (forthcoming,
I840-1914 Society, i688-l 832 (Cambridge, I985).
1993); Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and ' John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War,
Poverty: WorkingClass Culture in Salford and Money and the English State, i688-I 783
Manchester, 90oo0-939 (Buckingham, 1992); (I989); Paul Langford, Public Life and the
Mike Savage, 'Understanding political align- Propertied Englishman, 1689-1 798 (Oxford,
ments in contemporary Britain: do localities i99i); James Cronin, The Politics of State
matter?', Political GeographyQuarterly (1X986); Expansion: war, state and society in twentieth-
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, century Britain (i99 i).

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