ABSTRACT
One problem in studying political life from a longitudinal perspective is that historians tend to ride momentary winners. There should be historical writing from the point of view of political losers no less than political winners. Political marginals and deviant outsiders may often be those who produce real history in contrast to those who write official history. Historians often fail to take seriously that uses of history for definite social class and political goals. The marginality of restorationist monarchists is different than of the sans coullottes. The twentieth century is the high point of socialist development. But already the same tensions and strains that first appeared in industrial capitalism have emerged in industrial socialism. By midtwentieth century, history was reduced to decision making, and politics to strategic thinking. The emergence of marginality announces the rebirth in revolutionary sentiment, since the vissicitudes of change often lead to the last becoming first and the first coming in dead last.
