ABSTRACT
The words just quoted pose what is perhaps the central problem that has to be tackled in this study. They could be just rhetoric. They could also reflect a wider class consciousness. And on the answer depends the whole perspective of capitalist development presented here. Only if they can be said to reflect a wider political consciousness, a mass class consciousness, can one go on to argue for the concept of liberalization; that the economic and social changes of the 1840s and 1850s were indeed part of an overall social system response to anti-capitalist ideas having gained mass acceptance, and so become a ‘material force’. What follows cannot hope to provide a complete answer. Few things are more difficult to establish than class consciousness. Leaving aside the initial difficulty of defining something whose ideological content is always historically relative and specific, there is the still bigger problem of distinguishing the leaders and the led. The leaders may well have been using historically correct slogans. But what about their followers? It could be argued (very plausibly, in view of the timing of the various
upsurges in working-class activity) that any wider support was not much more than a spontaneous reaction to intolerable conditions. Or-granted that there may have been some deliberation, some cultural base-that this never went beyond the type of occupational solidarity examined in the previous chapter. How does one establish the difference?
