ABSTRACT
The fundamental question which lies behind working-class history is that of agency. To what extent, in what form and for what reasons do workers become politically active and so affect historical developments? This chapter shows how answers to this question have changed according to the political climate in which historians were working. In particular it distinguishes three different perspectives on working-class history which have gained prominence at various times. First, early historical research optimistically believed that working-class agency was steadily increasing as the influence of the institutions of the Labour movement—trade unions, the Labour Party, the co-operative societies—grew. ‘Labour history’ was the history designed to service and celebrate the Labour movement. Second, from the 1950s and 1960s a new form of working-class social history began to develop which was more critical of the Labour movement, and denied that it was the necessary or inevitable form of working-class politics. Instead, this new social history located working-class agency in the activities of workers in their workplaces, in their homes and in their leisure activities. It sought ‘real’ working-class agency in the routines and practices of everyday life, away from the terrain of bureaucratic party politics. Third, since the mid-1970s, partly as a result of the electoral weakness of the Labour Party, there has been greater questioning about whether the working class has ever been an important historical agent. The result has been a new form of historical research which downplays the importance of class and rereads the historical record to bring out the importance of non-class forms of agency.
