ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘class’ is less easy to handle than it appears to be at first. One school of historians has been inclined to argue that there was no such thing as ‘class’ before the Industrial Revolution, but this may simply be another way of saying, with Marx, that the Industrial Revolution radically altered the class structure. To say, as the Communist Manifesto does, that the whole of history is the story of class struggle, is to express an interpretation, a point of view, rather than to state an absolute truth. But such interpretations have an intrinsic logic of their own, and may be of great use as a framework for the writing of history. Robert Morris has wisely written: ‘For the social historian, the writings of Marx should be approached as a massive workbench for social history rather than as a contentious document of political philosophy’. 1 But other interpretations besides the Marxist one should never be repressed or forgotten. Thus, while the conditions of the masses and the influence of policies upon them must be a fundamental concern for the study of history, the lives and behaviour of the upper classes also reward study for their own sake.
