It is argued that both the tenacity of the neighbourhood and its adaptability were much greater than historians have tended to think, and that this was true not only during the ancien régime but also during the nineteenth century when the rate of mobility between towns and within towns reached enormous proportions. Demographic, social and cultural changes did not result in the destruction of the local community, but in its transformation, a transformation in which the growing need for reciprocity among working-class neighbours played a crucial role. The decline of more or less institutionalized forms of self-regulation went hand in hand with the construction by the lower classes of informal channels of social interaction based on local ties, which stimulated an active and participatory street life. Moreover, the tendency towards geographical segregation contributed to the development of a different collective sense of identity in working-class neighbourhoods, which added a new dimension to the concept of solidarity.

This essay notes the extent to which poststructuralism/postmodernism have generally espoused hostility to historical materialism, surveys some representative examples of historical writing that have gravitated toward the new critical theory in opposition to Marxism, and closes with a discussion of the ironic evolution of a poststructurally inclined, anti-Marxist historiography. Counter to the prevailing ideological consensus that Marxism has been brought to its interpretive knees by a series of analytic challenges and the political collapse of the world's ostensibly “socialist” states, this essay argues that historical materialism has lost neither its power to interpret the past nor its relevance to the contemporary intellectual terrain.

This paper examines the working class in the United States and Britain in order to find a new perspective on the origins and break-up of the World Federation of Trade Unions. While most previous works have focused on the roles of institutions and leaders, this research uncovers the important role played by the thoughts, actions, and inactions of average workers in international affairs. American and British workers, as key constituents of two of the most important organizations making up the WFTU, were not passive observers of world events. Rather, they were critical not only of how the world union movement functioned, but also of the process which came to be termed the Cold War.

Increased demand for lead on both domestic and international markets spurred on technological and organizational innovation in Derbyshire's lead mining industry. Population expanded due to immigration into the mining areas, and problems of poverty and proletarianization were created as the traditional small producers were marginalized by new capitalized mineworkings owned by aristocrats, merchants and gentlemen. Social conflict intensified over the ownership of mining rights; in particular, this dispute revolved around popular and élite notions of property and legality. This conflict engendered new forms of popular resistance and provides evidence of a language of class in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century saw the marginalization of the independent free miner, but memories of lost liberties conditioned the class consciousness of Derbyshire's new working class at the end of the century.

Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.

Conflicting interpretations of economic and social conditions in inter-war Britain are a staple diet of the historiography of the period. Can it be best characterized as one of social deprivation and economic decay or of social and economic improvement? The level of unemployment and its effects on those who experienced it is a critical element in the debate and this study will contribute to it in a number of ways. It will, through a case study of the East Midland coalfields, emphasize that underemployment (or short-time working) has been comparatively neglected in accounts of unemployment and the “real” incidence of the latter therefore underestimated. Moreover, the effects of underemployment were no less real in terms of depressing living standards than more permanent forms of unemployment. The traditional view of the relatively prosperous underemployed East Midlands' miner compared to his fully employed Durham or South Wales counterpart is, therefore, no longer tenable, The view, popularized recently by Benjamin and Kochin, that this form of unemployment was voluntary in nature will also be questioned as will the generalization that miners' trade unions preferred wage maintenance to maximising employment levels in their industrial relations strategies. Trade union officers gave a high priority to achieving an employment situation which combined work spreading and the receipt of statutory unemployment benefit by their members. The partial failure of these endeavours to mitigate the full impact of short-time working on miners' income is further evidence of the need to qualify the “optimistic” interpretation of living standards in inter-war Britain.

In West Germany during the 1950s, the social history of modernity was initiated by raising a series of questions probing the “internal structure” (inneres Gefüge) of industrial society. The predominant conception was of a self-contained era, shaped by a small number of structural elements. In such a perspective centered on static formations, little attention was given to internal ruptures and dynamic processes. This structuralist approach was in fact the linear continuation of a view of the social order which had been developed in the 1930s and '40s by Otto Brunner, one of its chief proponents, in his studies exploring, the way “land and power” were constituted during the early modern period.

This article illuminates the transforming impact of collective action in the light of the industrial jacquerie of 1886 in Belgium. This important episode of popular struggle fuelled a dialectical process of change which was marked by a fundamental shift in both social policy and in repertoires of collective action. In 1886 workers still drew on an old repertoire of collective action. Their struggle had such a disruptive force that it forced the state to intervene in labour conflicts. The conservative political élite responded with conciliatory gestures that foreshadowed a legislative programme of social reform. In the changed political climate the position of progressive wings in the two conservative parties was enhanced as the growing strength of the labour movement became more apparent. The industrial jacquerie functioned as a catalyst in the transition from old to new repertoires of collective action. In the aftermath of the revolt, mass collective action quickly, and extensively, came under the control of the Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB).

As an introduction to this essay, three points need to be made. First, the European labor movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on which we focus here, were part of bourgeois society. Secondly, they were a factor that challenged bourgeois society and thus contributed in several different ways to its change. Thirdly, as a result of this interaction, the labor movements themselves underwent changes. All of those were lasting changes. The systemic changes, imposed by revolutionary or military force, that accompanied the experiment in socialism, were not. In countries where the labor movement pursued socialist aims prior to the First World War on the crumbling foundations of a primarily pre-bourgeois society, such as in eastern and south-eastern Europe, it was the most radical force behind political democratization and modernization (Russia; Russian Poland: the Kingdom of Poland, Bulgaria). But it could not compensate for the society's evident lack of basic civic development, whereas the socialist experiment in Soviet Russia led not only to the demise of democratization but also to a halt of embourgeoisement.

Systematic comparison was alien to the historicist paradigm which dominated historical research and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Germany. Anyone aiming to reconstruct historical phenomena as individual events, study them under the aspect of ”development” and understand them in their context would not be interested in systematic identification of similarities and differences or in their explanation. Narrative and comparison were and are opposites. Without conceptual explanation and theoretical input, historical comparison is not possible. Because German historians were strongly influenced by the historicist paradigm until well into the second third of the twentieth century, systematic comparison did not play a major role in their work. In essence it was left to important outsiders like Otto Hintze and historically oriented sociologists like Max Weber.

The last two centuries have produced, transformed and destroyed a myriad of political symbols of a linguistic, visual and ritual form. Between, say 1790 and 1990 the political sphere witnessed both an explosion in the generation of symbols and a radical decline of symbols. This calls for explanations.