ABSTRACT
In recent years, it has been common for historians to complain that social history has ignored politics. 1 Although popular politics was examined through the discipline of social history and many historians were themselves intensely political, nevertheless the realm of politics was deemed unproblematic. As we saw in Chapter Two, both Marxists and many non-Marxists believed that politics was a reflection of the economic base. This chapter will review the ways in which revisionist historians have rejected the premises of this approach and begun to rethink the relationship between politics and society. The characteristic of this new school of historians is their belief in the ‘relative autonomy of the political’.
