Passé et présent : l'actualité du débat sur les classes sociales dans l'historiographie marxiste anglaise
Francois Poirier, Past and Present : the relevance of the debate on class in English Marxist historiography ; This paper examines the relationship between immediate political change and theoretical developments in Marxist-influenced history. Beginning with the debate of the 1970s on the 19th c. Labour Aristocracy, it covers the debate of the early 1980s on the labour process, which reconsidered the content and role of class formation and behaviour. As this challenge to the accepted outlook on the cultural formation of the working class was also rooted in iconoclastic revisiting of the Industrial Revolution, the latest debates "rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution" (late 1980s onward), are explored. Developments in oral history are then reviewed, as well as their implications respecting gender and class in the reconstruction of the past. Such questions lead on to a study of the debate on language and class, while the dual role of Birmingham's "cultural studies" and of History Workshop is assessed within this debate, as well as its articulation with some of the latest research on popular representations. Throughout these polemics, a marked shift away from the centrality of class is evidenced at the same time as a similar shift occurs in present-day political discourse and socio-economic structure.