ABSTRACT
In all the legislative bodies there were, by the time socialist parties appeared, political parties, some still rather rudimentary, usually conservative or liberal and divided by issues that reflected conflicts between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, such as clericalism and the extent of royal powers. More important for an explanation of the present-day absence of socialist labor parties than the history of legislatures and political parties in the decades before the modernizers' revolution is the status after this revolution in the period when industrial workers became numerous. Unlike the new working class in late nineteenth-century Western Europe, they did not grow into societies with prominently functioning legislatures, parties and elections in and through which political conflicts were openly fought out. On the contrary, modernizing movements emphasized unity against an enemy said to be opposed to the entire society, and workers therefore were under pressure to organize within the modernizing movement.
