movements of the nineteenth century. But recent events also cast doubt on the Marxist alternative to orthodox labor history. Not only in the United States but in all the highly industrialized countries of the world, working-class movements had renounced revolution, while Marxist parties had come to power in preindustrial countries like Russia, China, and Cuba. The course of history seemed to suggest, as Barrington Moore put it in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, that revolutions are made not by rising classes but by classes "over whom the wave of progress is about to roll."

In one form or another, this intuition informed the new labor history that emerged in the sixties and seventies, much of it inspired by E. P. Thompson's classic, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). As Thompson's title indicates, the new generation of labor historians still struggled to reconcile their findings with Marxism, just as Moore struggled to reconcile his analysis of the "Prussian road" to modernization with the Marxist theory of historical development. Thompson argued that the significance of Paine, Cobbett, and other such populists lay in their contribution to the more fully developed working-class consciousness that took shape later on. The work of Thompson's followers, however, made it more and more difficult to escape the conclusion that popular radicalism had lost both its comprehensive scope and much of its intensity the more it identified itself with the particular class interests of industrial workers. The "making of the working class" looked more and more like the solidification of an interest group fighting for "improvements in the capitalist industrial system," in the words of Craig Calhoun, and winning an admittedly important "series of reforms" that were nevertheless granted "without sacrificing the capitalist industrial society, or even most of the cultural hegemony and material power of the elite strata." On the other hand, "primitive" or "premature" rebellions against industrialism, as orthodox Marxists contemptuously referred to them— movements led by artisans and yeoman farmers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—began to look radical by comparison with what had followed. "The most potentially revolutionary claims," says Calhoun, "were those which demanded that industrial capitalism be resisted in order to protect craft communities and traditional values."

Historians of nineteenth-century labor movements and working-class culture continue to disagree about a number of issues, and it would be

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