ABSTRACT
The verdict of history may be that Disraeli saved the world because it is not to be believed that the poor would have tolerated for ever this exclusion from the benefits of increased productivity. If political economy and the Parliamentary politicians had insisted on imposing this exclusion on them, then in the end it would have been inevitable that they should turn against party politics and the political economists. So there were the Chartists. But these years also saw the first articulate statement of a theory of history, more important than that of the Chartists, which challenged the whole basis upon which existing arrangements were made—or at the least appeared to do so. In 1848 appeared Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto on Communism. In that manifesto, as in all his subsequent writings, Marx swept away with impatience the whole nursery-version of history, the record of the rise and fall of dynasties, or the mock-figures of party politicians. History’s one reality, he claimed, was the unceasing struggle between rival economic classes. In every state the Government was necessarily but “an executive committee for managing the affairs of the governing class as a whole”. Minor differences within the governing class, such as those between Whigs and Tories, or Liberals and Conservatives, were secondary and negligible.
