Once upon a time, the making of the British working class served as a powerful master narrative for the flourishing field of social history. In the last twenty years, as Andrew August notes, “historians [have] built upon feminist and linguistic theory to challenge the methods of social history, and its emphasis on social conditions. They have denied the primacy of the social realm, advocating a focus on language and culture instead” (2). Since August's expert and intelligent survey is the first full-scale effort to take the measure of these changes, it enables us to consider just how far the field of working-class history has in fact been transformed. August himself wisely discounts the most extreme demands that the concept of class be discarded. “Class” has its place, he acknowledges, so long as those who use it understand that “working class men and women did not think about their worlds exclusively in terms of class. They identified with others on the basis of gender, craft, religion, locality, nation, empire and other ways as well” (2). This suggestion is perfectly reasonable, but few if any serious historians would disagree. When class is fractured (rather than reinforced) by such potentially countervailing allegiances, it will certainly not become the sole basis of working-class consciousness or identity.
In fact, August's own substantive approach to the complexities of the historical record turns out to be a good deal more conventional than the iconoclasm of his introduction avows. The book is divided into three sections; the first concentrating on the classic period of the industrial revolution (1832–70); the second, on the stabilization of the “traditional” urban working-class community (1870–1914); and the third, on the contradictory transactions of the interwar period, when old industries/communities were mired in depression, while new ones painfully and erratically advanced. Within each section, however, August departs from the mold of earlier surveys, which rooted working-class history in the transformations of production relations. His own eclectic organization does a better job of capturing the multiple dimensions of working-class experience, albeit at the expense of jettisoning the analytical dynamic that formerly drove the master narrative of class formation from one phase to the next. Each of August's sections begins with a chapter on family and community. He proceeds from there to the experience of labor, then follows with a corresponding chapter on leisure, and finally ends with a discussion of identity and politics. While the changes in urbanization, family, migration, work, leisure, and culture are all tracked together, no efforts are made to disentangle them from one another or to distinguish those that are causes from those that are effects.
On one level, this strategy makes considerable sense. It facilitates the integration of recent scholarship on recreation, consumption, gender, and the family and forestalls any lapse into narrow economic determinism. Yet it provides no alternative means of elucidating the processes and structures within which the working-class experience was enmeshed. By unquestioningly equating “class” with “the social” (as poststructuralists are wont to do), August misses the extent to which his own story remains rooted in the working-class encounter with capitalism—an encounter that played out in environmental, gendered, and ethnic as well as in class terms. August's insistence that militant working-class consciousness was not the rule, but the exception, is a useful antidote to the wishful thinking of certain 1960s leftists, and he is probably right to remind us that most working people cared less about the formal politics of national parties and trade unions than about the everyday politics of the family, the community, and the street. These, however, are not novel insights available only to those who have taken the linguistic turn. On the contrary, they are logical outgrowths of the very 1960s and ’70s historiography that the linguistic turn was supposed to have overthrown.
Indeed, a case could be made that August's effectively written and well-balanced survey actually testifies to the continuity of labor historiography. His own analysis (occasional rhetoric notwithstanding) undermines any notion that “the social” has been pervasively supplanted by discursive hermeneutics or “the linguistic turn.” By drawing disproportionately on very recent scholarship, August does ensure that his book will be up-to-date and free from any musty 1970s odor. However, he cannot escape the incontestable reality that the basic agenda for labor history was set during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Indeed, 56 percent of the 469 (mostly secondary source) titles that are listed in his bibliography were published between 1965 and 1990, while only 40 percent were published during the last seventeen years. Most of these recent works, moreover, are highly specialized studies that build along lines that were previously laid down. Even the notion that interest has shifted from social to political history is problematized by August's decision to devote more pages to the emergence of street culture (13) than to the development of the Labor Party (7). Surely this is the ultimate (perhaps excessive?) triumph of “history from below.”
One conclusion that August might have drawn from his own survey is the extent to which the entire field remains trapped in the shadow of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), which opened the floodgates to a new Marxist historiography on working-class formation while also providing “culturalist” critics with the interpretive instruments by which crudely reductionist versions of Marxism were dethroned. In the last decade, Thompson's working class has been partially raced, and thoroughly gendered, but the best of the works that effect such revisions take their inspiration and starting point from his magnum opus itself. To be sure, it is no longer possible to romanticize this fractured and largely depoliticized working class with 1960s abandon. We have indeed lost Thompson's tone of hopeful celebration, but we have simultaneously refined the research methods that he pioneered, while leaving his theoretical evasions unresolved.
By writing a book that rejects Thompson's conclusions about radical working-class consciousness while heavily relying on his insights into plebeian culture, August has produced a text that reflects the chastened, disillusioned spirit of our times. While it lacks the urgency and intellectual force of the best of its predecessors, it may be the most we can expect from the era of Blair, Brown, and Bush. As such, it represents an interim report on the state of play in a field that has been metaphysically deconstructed but that still generates much valuable empirical scholarship and awaits reconstruction in alternate conceptual terms.
