ABSTRACT
The aim of this essay is to outline some recent developments in Marxist historiography, and to situate these in the context of general theoretical discussions current within Marxism, in particular over the question of the analysis of ‘ideology’ and ‘class-consciousness’. The importance of this question is intimately connected with larger political and theoretical events of recent times; especially the re-assertion of Marxism as a humanism, and subsequent attempts (expressed above all in the work of Louis Althusser and in the rediscovery of that of Antonio Gramsci) to provide a more scientific analysis of social formations than allowed for by the (related) extremes of ‘economism’ and ‘humanism’.
