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The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis
1984, clean copy, no markings, light toning topages, Professional booksellers since 1981
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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November 3, 2022
Harvey J. Kaye presents a useful introductory survey of the leading British Marxist historians to come out of the Communist Party Historians group. Kaye covers Maurice Dobb’s contributions to the debate on the transition to capitalism, Rodney Hilton’s studies on feudalism and the English peasantry, Christopher Hill’s account of the English Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm’s world histories, and E.P. Thompson’s famous The Making of the English Working Class. Beyond a shared background, Kaye argues that they represent a distinct theoretical tradition within the field of Marxism. The five English historians attempt to overcome the economic determinism of the “base-superstructure” model of historical materialism through a “class-struggle” analysis of the historical problematic of capitalism's origins, development, and expansion. In addition, their work provided important contributions to the development of “history from below.” By their transcending of economic determinism, they have developed Marxism as a theory of “class-determination” wherein class struggle is central to the historical process. As a survey, Harvey J. Kaye succeeds in providing a concise and readable introduction to the work of these five historians. As a work of theory, Kaye’s book falls short in arguing for the theoretical significance and uniqueness of their work as a distinct tradition.
The book is comprised of five individual chapters for each historian bookended by an introductory chapter and a conclusion. In the Introduction, Kaye argues for his view that the five historians represent a distinct tradition based on class-determination in the context of three other then-recent essays that situate them differently. Raphael Samuel considers the British Marxist historians as being within a tradition of British Marxist historiography that has its origins in Marx himself. In contrast, Eric Hobsbawm argues that no such tradition existed prior to the Communist Party Historians’ Group which they were active between 1946 and 1956. Richard Johnson places them within a generalized post-war British intellectual milieu interested in cultural relations that meant in Marxist historical studies a shift away from economic structure and relations. Under this interpretation, the historians after Maurice Dobb represent a break with his focus on economic relationships. While Kaye does not present any arguments against the Samuel and Hobsbawm accounts, he disagrees with the idea of a theoretical rupture after Dobb as proposed by Johnson.
His disagreement dovetails into chapter two, “Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism.” According to Kaye, Dobb regarded capitalism as a historically specific mode of production based on the wage relationship between capitalist and worker, i.e. a class relationship. He situates Dobb’s Studies in the Develop of Capitalism in the “transition debates” as arguing for viewing capitalism as a “mode” of production, i.e. as a social relationship between “producers and their overlords” (45), alongside Kohachiro Takahashi, Ernesto Laclau, Eugene Genovese, and Robert Brenner. Against this view are those who view capitalism as a “system” of production, i.e. as a system of exchange relations, such as Paul Sweezey, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Perry Anderson. Such a comparison is an informative historiographical overview of the debates on the transition to capitalism that ends up going against Kaye’s broader thesis of the British Marxists as a distinct tradition. While Kaye argues that Brenner is a student of these historians, Takahashi, Laclau, and Genovese present a “class-determination” analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism independently of the British Marxists.
The following chapters on Hilton, Hill, and Hobsbawm are less problematic with a brief biography and summary of their works with particular emphasis put on their discussions of class. Chapter six, “E.P. Thompson on the Making of the English Working Class,” covers both Thompson’s magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class and his polemics with structuralist Marxism in “The Poverty of Theory.” In a parallel to his argument against viewing Dobbs as an economic determinist, Kaye disputes the notion that Thompson’s work is culturalist detached from any economic understanding of class. Instead, he argues, Thompson considers class as a relationship and process that men and women experience through their determinate production relationships. Thus, Dobb, the supposed economic determinist, and Thompson, the supposed culturalist, share a “class-determination” viewpoint also shared by Hilton, Hill, and Hobsbawm. Thompson’s view of “class-determination” is contrasted with the anti-empiricist and structuralist philosophy of Althusserian Marxism which he polemicized against in “The Poverty of Theory.” Rather than explain the emergence of the debate, the debate is presented in a one-sided manner wherein only Thompson is allowed to speak. While such an approach makes sense in a survey of Thompson’s thought, it disguises many of the theoretical questions at play which complicate his view of the British Marxists as a unique tradition. Althusser, like the British Marxist historians, also desired to move away from the economic determinism of the “base-superstructure” model by recourse to a focus on relations of production leading to a study of law, ideology, and the state. While Althusser and his followers do place less emphasis on the importance of class struggle compared to the British Marxist historians, the line between them on the question of economic determinism is blurrier than Kaye presents it as.
The conclusion, “The Collective Contribution,” is where Kaye removes these thinkers from isolation and compares their thought together. According to Kaye, unlike prior and contemporary historians “from below” who merely focus on the experiences of the lower classes, the British Marxist historians’ “history from the bottom up” stress the importance of the lower classes as active participants in history. Such a perspective is connected to their theory of class-determination which places class struggle as the historical process. Rather than an economic or technological base driving history, the social relations of production, which are economic, political, cultural, and moral, drive history. Their view of history thus moves from a strict “base-superstructure” model to one that considers society as a totality. However, such a move is not unique to British Marxist historians, to the British historiographical tradition, or even to the post-war intellectual milieu. The entire tradition of Western Marxism, beginning with György Lukács’s 1923 History and Class Consciousness, can be considered an attempt to analyze the social totality. While Lukács argues in a Hegelian and eschatological mode foreign to the empiricism of the British Marxist historians, he shares with them the emphasis on the social totality and the active role of the proletariat, i.e. class struggle, in history. His view of the proletariat as the subject-object of history may be seen as the philosophic counterpoint to a “history from the bottom up.” As alluded to in the discussions of the transition debate and Althusser above, much of what Kaye considers to be unique to the British Marxist historians are common questions considered by a tradition of Marxist thought defined by a critique of the official Marxism of Soviet-aligned communist parties.
The insistence on a specific theoretical tradition also forces Kaye to downplay the discontinuities between these thinkers. For example, Kaye does acknowledge that Eric Hobsbawm remained within the Communist Party unlike his peers, and retained the use of the “base-superstructure” model. However instead of addressing how this might place him in opposition to someone like E.P. Thompson who was a consistent critic of official communism and the “base-superstructure” model, merely sweeps the issue aside and emphasizes the similarities in the importance he places on class. Even taking it for granted that these thinkers assume a distinct theoretical tradition, intellectual traditions will always have discontinuities and ruptures between members which Kaye never explores. As a result, his argument becomes less compelling as it calls into question how many differences between the historians, he is obscuring for the sake of emphasizing their continuity. Considering that many of the positions and questions that Kaye considers central to the uniqueness of their tradition are not unique, it begins to appear arbitrary where he draws the line on what discontinuity is major enough to comprise a rupture with this tradition. Why is the differences between Hobsbawm or Dobb with the rest of the British Marxist historians not significant enough to consider a serious discontinuity, while the similarities with historians such as Robert Brenner or Eugene Genovese?
Despite the theoretical problems of the work, Harvey J. Kaye’s The British Marxist Historians provides a solid introduction to the works of five influential British historians. For each historian, Kaye provides a biography, summary of their works, and their historiographical context which strike a good balance between brevity that could leave too much out and a denseness that deters readers unfamiliar with the topic. The work serves as a good survey for undergraduate and graduate students interested in any of these five thinkers, Marxist historiography, or debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Kaye’s theoretical arguments, however, must be taken with a degree of skepticism since they obscure or insufficiently cover many of the twentieth-century Marxist debates the British Marxist historians were enmeshed in.
The book is comprised of five individual chapters for each historian bookended by an introductory chapter and a conclusion. In the Introduction, Kaye argues for his view that the five historians represent a distinct tradition based on class-determination in the context of three other then-recent essays that situate them differently. Raphael Samuel considers the British Marxist historians as being within a tradition of British Marxist historiography that has its origins in Marx himself. In contrast, Eric Hobsbawm argues that no such tradition existed prior to the Communist Party Historians’ Group which they were active between 1946 and 1956. Richard Johnson places them within a generalized post-war British intellectual milieu interested in cultural relations that meant in Marxist historical studies a shift away from economic structure and relations. Under this interpretation, the historians after Maurice Dobb represent a break with his focus on economic relationships. While Kaye does not present any arguments against the Samuel and Hobsbawm accounts, he disagrees with the idea of a theoretical rupture after Dobb as proposed by Johnson.
His disagreement dovetails into chapter two, “Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism.” According to Kaye, Dobb regarded capitalism as a historically specific mode of production based on the wage relationship between capitalist and worker, i.e. a class relationship. He situates Dobb’s Studies in the Develop of Capitalism in the “transition debates” as arguing for viewing capitalism as a “mode” of production, i.e. as a social relationship between “producers and their overlords” (45), alongside Kohachiro Takahashi, Ernesto Laclau, Eugene Genovese, and Robert Brenner. Against this view are those who view capitalism as a “system” of production, i.e. as a system of exchange relations, such as Paul Sweezey, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Perry Anderson. Such a comparison is an informative historiographical overview of the debates on the transition to capitalism that ends up going against Kaye’s broader thesis of the British Marxists as a distinct tradition. While Kaye argues that Brenner is a student of these historians, Takahashi, Laclau, and Genovese present a “class-determination” analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism independently of the British Marxists.
The following chapters on Hilton, Hill, and Hobsbawm are less problematic with a brief biography and summary of their works with particular emphasis put on their discussions of class. Chapter six, “E.P. Thompson on the Making of the English Working Class,” covers both Thompson’s magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class and his polemics with structuralist Marxism in “The Poverty of Theory.” In a parallel to his argument against viewing Dobbs as an economic determinist, Kaye disputes the notion that Thompson’s work is culturalist detached from any economic understanding of class. Instead, he argues, Thompson considers class as a relationship and process that men and women experience through their determinate production relationships. Thus, Dobb, the supposed economic determinist, and Thompson, the supposed culturalist, share a “class-determination” viewpoint also shared by Hilton, Hill, and Hobsbawm. Thompson’s view of “class-determination” is contrasted with the anti-empiricist and structuralist philosophy of Althusserian Marxism which he polemicized against in “The Poverty of Theory.” Rather than explain the emergence of the debate, the debate is presented in a one-sided manner wherein only Thompson is allowed to speak. While such an approach makes sense in a survey of Thompson’s thought, it disguises many of the theoretical questions at play which complicate his view of the British Marxists as a unique tradition. Althusser, like the British Marxist historians, also desired to move away from the economic determinism of the “base-superstructure” model by recourse to a focus on relations of production leading to a study of law, ideology, and the state. While Althusser and his followers do place less emphasis on the importance of class struggle compared to the British Marxist historians, the line between them on the question of economic determinism is blurrier than Kaye presents it as.
The conclusion, “The Collective Contribution,” is where Kaye removes these thinkers from isolation and compares their thought together. According to Kaye, unlike prior and contemporary historians “from below” who merely focus on the experiences of the lower classes, the British Marxist historians’ “history from the bottom up” stress the importance of the lower classes as active participants in history. Such a perspective is connected to their theory of class-determination which places class struggle as the historical process. Rather than an economic or technological base driving history, the social relations of production, which are economic, political, cultural, and moral, drive history. Their view of history thus moves from a strict “base-superstructure” model to one that considers society as a totality. However, such a move is not unique to British Marxist historians, to the British historiographical tradition, or even to the post-war intellectual milieu. The entire tradition of Western Marxism, beginning with György Lukács’s 1923 History and Class Consciousness, can be considered an attempt to analyze the social totality. While Lukács argues in a Hegelian and eschatological mode foreign to the empiricism of the British Marxist historians, he shares with them the emphasis on the social totality and the active role of the proletariat, i.e. class struggle, in history. His view of the proletariat as the subject-object of history may be seen as the philosophic counterpoint to a “history from the bottom up.” As alluded to in the discussions of the transition debate and Althusser above, much of what Kaye considers to be unique to the British Marxist historians are common questions considered by a tradition of Marxist thought defined by a critique of the official Marxism of Soviet-aligned communist parties.
The insistence on a specific theoretical tradition also forces Kaye to downplay the discontinuities between these thinkers. For example, Kaye does acknowledge that Eric Hobsbawm remained within the Communist Party unlike his peers, and retained the use of the “base-superstructure” model. However instead of addressing how this might place him in opposition to someone like E.P. Thompson who was a consistent critic of official communism and the “base-superstructure” model, merely sweeps the issue aside and emphasizes the similarities in the importance he places on class. Even taking it for granted that these thinkers assume a distinct theoretical tradition, intellectual traditions will always have discontinuities and ruptures between members which Kaye never explores. As a result, his argument becomes less compelling as it calls into question how many differences between the historians, he is obscuring for the sake of emphasizing their continuity. Considering that many of the positions and questions that Kaye considers central to the uniqueness of their tradition are not unique, it begins to appear arbitrary where he draws the line on what discontinuity is major enough to comprise a rupture with this tradition. Why is the differences between Hobsbawm or Dobb with the rest of the British Marxist historians not significant enough to consider a serious discontinuity, while the similarities with historians such as Robert Brenner or Eugene Genovese?
Despite the theoretical problems of the work, Harvey J. Kaye’s The British Marxist Historians provides a solid introduction to the works of five influential British historians. For each historian, Kaye provides a biography, summary of their works, and their historiographical context which strike a good balance between brevity that could leave too much out and a denseness that deters readers unfamiliar with the topic. The work serves as a good survey for undergraduate and graduate students interested in any of these five thinkers, Marxist historiography, or debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Kaye’s theoretical arguments, however, must be taken with a degree of skepticism since they obscure or insufficiently cover many of the twentieth-century Marxist debates the British Marxist historians were enmeshed in.
December 28, 2020
A pesar de ser una obra escrita hace ya 31 años, esta no peca de ser una obra desactualizada para los tiempos actuales. A día de hoy, aún es funcional si se trata de realizar un primer acercamiento a la obra historiográfica marxista, a través de alguien que es evidente su conocimiento acabado del tema, dado a lo interesante de sus observaciones y análisis de las obras de los historiadores británicos, lo que le resta complejidad a la lectura, convirtiéndola en algo más amigable para el lector que busca un primer comienzo en esta temática. Kaye cumplió fehacientemente con la labor de demostrar que el Grupo de historiadores del Partido Comunista de Gran Bretaña ha sido una fuente de intelectuales que lograron formar una tradición teórica en pos del conocimiento marxista, algo que Kaye logró demostrar mediante un uso prominente de fuentes primarias por sobre vagas interpretaciones de los autores estudiados, ya que se dedica a examinar las principales obras de los historiadores marxistas, complementando este análisis con otras fuentes provenientes de autores variados que aportan mayor dinamismo a la obra y a la discusión de la tesis. No obstante, algo que puede ser un primer tropiezo para lectores no afines a la lectura de temáticas relacionadas a la obra, es la falta de profundidad al momento de hacer una introducción que, a pesar de ser un muy buen comienzo para la obra en cuestión, si queda al debe al momento de ahondar en cuestiones teóricas, que se relacionan principalmente con una mejor exposición sobre la clásica tradición marxista de los primeros tiempos, puesto a que esta se le refiere mayoritariamente al momento de las críticas, a veces, sin dar el espacio suficiente para que estas teorías puedan ser expuestas de forma más somera desde un principio, sin caer solo en críticas que pueden abrumar y dar una visión unívoca y sesgada al respecto.
February 13, 2026
Often turdig and always dated historiographical survey of some of Britain’s best historians. But sprinkled in is just enough magic to transport me back to being a wide eyed student first properly discovering the world and the lives of the people that have made it up
December 26, 2025
brilliant
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews