Contenu du sommaire : Sciences sociales et socialisme en Grande-Bretagne

Véronique de Rudder, Paul Goodwin, Racism in Great Britain : Theories and debates This article reviews the field of "race relations'' research in the UK since the 1950s. In contrast to France where research on racism is dominated by migration issues, the overwhelming focus in Britain is on the "race and ethnic relations" paradigm in which migration is peripheral. The most important theories and debates in the UK are surveyed, focusing chronologically on questions of discrimination and institutional racism ; the development of theories of "race" and ethnic relations by key theorists including Michael Banton and John Rex ; Marxist critiques and political economy approaches ; and recent work in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.

François Poirier, Past and Present : the relevance of the debate on class in English Marxist historiography This paper examines the relationship between immediate political change and theoretical developments in Marxist-influenced history. Beginning with the debate of the 1970s on the 19th c. Labour Aristocracy, it covers the debate of the early 1980s on the labour process, which reconsidered the content and role of class formation and behaviour. As this challenge to the accepted outlook on the cultural formation of the working class was also rooted in iconoclastic revisiting of the Industrial Revolution, the latest debates "rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution" (late 1980s onward), are explored. Developments in oral history are then reviewed, as well as their implications respecting gender and class in the reconstruction of the past. Such questions lead on to a study of the debate on language and class, while the dual role of Birmingham's "cultural studies" and of History Workshop is assessed within this debate, as well as its articulation with some of the latest research on popular representations. Throughout these polemics, a marked shift away from the centrality of class is evidenced at the same time as a similar shift occurs in present-day political discourse and socio-economic structure.

Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, The Romantic Current in British Social Sciences, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams There exists in contemporary British social sciences a significant Romantic current, continuing the rich 19th century tradition of criticism against utilitarianism and the modern capitalist society (Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris). This leftist or revolutionary version of romanticism is particularly well represented in social history and in cultural studies, and E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams are its best known and most important representatives.

Perry Anderson, A Culture in Contraflow (Recent British Historiography) Variegated forms of self-proclaimed historiographic revision - not a few Meriting the label of reaction - have taken the initiative in recent years (Geoffrey Elton, J. C. D. Clark). Compared with the United States, there can be no doubt of the conservative impetus of the past decade, represented by such ideologies as Thatcherite individualism or Jacobite obscurantism But the best historians of the Left have continued to produce major work challenging or undercutting the themes of the new conservatism.

Eric Hobsbawm, Labour in the Great City The giant city was, among other things, a giant concentration of workers. While labour thus bad some potential assets in the megalopolis, it was also an inhospitable environment for labour movements. It was industrially too heterogeneous to have a unity based on work, as mining villages, or mill-towns or shipyard towns had. The great city was far too large to form a real community. But issues such as transport and bousing were used by the labour movement to win popular support

Sheila Rowbotham, Equality or Difference The challenge to universalities which conceal power relations has been a persistent theme in feminist writing in the last two decades. But the claims women made for rights were based on the assumption that human beings were comparable even if differences existed. Poor and working class women's social and economic circumstances demand more than a reiteration of difference and they are not to be solved by the feminism which is based on equal opportunities.

E.P. Thompson, Romanticism, Utopianism, and Moralism : the Case of William Morris Morris's independent derivation of communism out of the logic of the Romantic tradition may be assimilated to Marxism only in the course of a process of re-ordering within Marxism itself. 'Civilization' and 'barbarism' were terms which Morris always employed with ironic inversion, drawing in part upon the inheritance from Carlyle and Ruskin and in part upon the very deep commitment he had for certain pre-capitalist values and modes. Morris's youthful Romantic rebellion was not a rebellion of individual sensibility against "society" but a rebellion of value, of aspiration, against actuality.