Reply: Class and the Politics of History

Abstract

Our principal anxiety about the responses to “Farewell to the Working Class?” concerns their strangely private character. In the main—the response of Barbara Weinstein excepted—the respondents seem to use the opportunity our article has provided simply to restate some of their own previous positions. Often they engage neither with the substance of our article nor, equally importantly, with its conciliatory tone. As a result, the chance further to depolemicize these important debates has been lost or otherwise evaded in a variety of reiterations.