ABSTRACT
The feminist scholar Anna Marie Smith points out that one of the post-Marxism project's aims is to escape the sort of class-centred approach that posits the existence of only two classes: the bourgeoisie and the working class. Stedman Jones's book about the languages of British class society was a milestone for research on the history of the working class. The chief critic of social history was the openly postmodern historian Patrick Joyce, a scholar dismissed by many of his colleagues, but supported, crucially, by Joan W. Scott. Joyce's first serious attempt at postmodern working-class history was Visions of the People. In the 1990s, the ripples from Scott and Stedman Jones's work continued to be felt in postmodernism's impact on the discipline of history and what is often called the crisis of social history. According to Pierre Bourdieu, experience of the particular class condition that characterizes a given location in social space imprints a particular set of dispositions upon the individual.
