Volume 39, Number 21 · December 17, 1992
Cutting Classes
By David Cannadine
Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850
by Theodore Koditschek
Cambridge University Press, 611 pp., $79.95
Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds 1820–1850
by R.J. Morris
Manchester University Press, 356 pp., £45.00
Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914
by Patrick Joyce
Cambridge University Press, 449 pp., $49.95
The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950
by Ross McKibbin
Oxford University Press, 308 pp., $65.00
When John Major unexpectedly became Britain's prime minister in November 1990, he announced that his chief political ambition was to make the country a 'classless society,' a commitment which he repeated even more vigorously after the recent general election. That Mr. Major seemed to be turning his back on such eternal Conservative verities as tradition, hierarchy, and inequality is only one of the many ironies in this extraordinary remark. That he seemed to be committing the Tories to something which Marx eagerly looked forward to as the end point of the historical process, and which had for most of the twentieth century been the raison d'être of the Labour Party, is yet another. But there is a third irony, which for a historian is the most intriguing of them all. In recognizing that the classless millennium has not yet been ushered in, Mr. Major reminds us just how class-bound a society Britain still is—and, by implication, always has been. Yet in seeing class as so central an element in British life and in British history, he has adopted a position exactly the opposite of the one it has recently become fashionable for social historians to maintain.
Review, 5463 words
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