ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that an open and democratic scholarship requires more work from the historian, not less: a more complex understanding of historical process, more boldness in extending the boundaries of enquiry, a greater effort to achieve clarity of presentation. By setting up the editorial collective to produce the journal the authors hope to share the work of the Workshop more widely, and to give it more regular and permanent expression. Throughout British society a desire for historical understanding continues to exist; and it is only sometimes fulfilled by the manufacturers of part series, popularizations, television entertainment, and so forth. 'Serious history' has become a subject reserved for the specialist. Like the Workshops, the journal will have a strong grounding in working-class experience, but it will also speak from the start to the internationality of class experience, and will take up theoretical questions in history more explicitly.
