ABSTRACT
BY SOCIAL history, I mean that sort of history writing that makes social groupings and especially socioeconomic classes the focus of its attention. At present scholars concerned with this kind of history seem to make one of two choices, neither altogether happy. They try to operate without a framework, or they operate within a stultifying framework—the Marxist interpretation of history. To choose the former is to choose inaccuracy and incoherence in describing chaos. To choose the latter is to choose intelligibility and coherence in describing a myth, and then to baptize the myth as history. The curious and brute fact is that a good number of historians say they choose the first horn of the dilemma; and then firmly impale themselves on the second horn. More historians than I should like to number, much less name, are in their historical practice bad and incompetent Marxists, incompetent because unconscious; Marxist in spite of themselves. They say they have no framework for social history, yet they write the social history of Western civilization for every century up to the nineteenth in terms of the rise of the middle class and the decline of the aristocracy, in those strictly Marxist terms and in no other.
