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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003)

NINETEENTH-CENTURY popular politics has long been the most dynamic and contentious subject within the historiography of modern Britain. For much of the 1960s through to the 1980s there was, however, something approximating a consensus as most students of the period accepted the New Left-inspired cultural materialist approach, best exemplified by Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). During the 1980s some of those schooled in this method — notably Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce — began to question its intellectual basis. They were particularly exercised by cultural materialists' belief that social being or 'experience' was the primary influence on consciousness and almost ineluctably led to class feeling. Instead, and in a variety of ways, detractors claimed ideas, texts, or 'discourse' structured consciousness. Those who took this 'linguistic turn' consequently questioned the importance of class identity to manual workers and stressed the importance of political projects other than socialism –the most important of which was, they believed, radical liberalism.

This collection brings together six of James Epstein's key articles and chapters published since 1986, that is since the linguistic turn had been taken, two of which (along with the introduction) take an overtly theoretical tack while four put his ideas into practice. Readers will be familiar with Epstein's work on popular radicalism and if the collection simply brought together some of his previously published work it should still be warmly welcomed. The book, however, does much more than that. It represents a pointed contribution to what Epstein refers to as the "new political and cultural history of modern Britain" and aims to "renegotiate the ground" between cultural materialists and those favouring discourse. As a result, there is much of interest for those interested in modern British history as well as the nature of the historical discipline as a whole.

It is in the introduction and the first two chapters that Epstein maps out his position. How far this can be described as a "middle ground," as is claimed, is open to doubt, for while Thompson's shortcomings are noted, Epstein often gives his former mentor the benefit of the doubt. He is however not uncritical of Thompson's central notion of 'experience,' conceding this was conceived as too simply emerging from people's direct confrontation with the material world and neglected how it could be constructed discursively. Thompson is also taken to task for believing 'experience' led to the creation of a homogeneous and fixed working-class consciousness. There is nonetheless some special pleading. Thompson's materialism is, for example, described as "ambivalent," although it is striking, in retrospect, how much he shared with those crude materialists attacked by himself and others in the New Left after 1956. Most obviously, while Epstein is correct to note that Thompson was interested in using a wide variety of texts to make his case, he nonetheless read them informed by the same prior intent: to seek out expressions of class sentiment.

Epstein discusses the work of Stedman Jones and Joyce in two discrete chapters. The former's 1983 essay on Chartism was the first clear sign that there was trouble in store for cultural materialists, as there Stedman Jones stressed the importance of political language — rather than social and economic developments — to the movement's rise and fall. This led him to characterize Chartism as more of a late expression of 18th-century radicalism rather than a proto-socialist, class-based movement, as many cultural materialists were wont to do. Epstein takes issue with that conclusion by reasonably questioning Stedman Jones's emphasis on formal expressions of Chartist ideology and correctly claiming that, as political language is inherently and deliberately vague, it could be open to numerous readings. Thus, Epstein suggests Stedman Jones' failure to study how Chartism's many humble followers read the movement's public discourse meant he overlooked how they gave it a class meaning.

Epstein looks on aspects of Joyce's work more indulgently. This is partly because even since Joyce laboured under the auspices of the discursive approach he consulted a wider array of texts than Stedman Jones ever did, allowing him to acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of working-class attitudes. Epstein nonetheless criticizes Joyce's employment of a new master category, that of "populism," to replace class — pointing to the paradox of a postmodernist doing such a thing. He also disparages Joyce's failure — despite his supposed firm grounding in social history — to take due account of how the populist language he describes was received, assuming (like Stedman Jones) that universal concepts were read in the same way by differing groups. In particular, Epstein questions what he rather kindly refers to as Joyce's "innocent" interpretation of Gladstonian liberalism, accusing him of too readily believing it assumed the character its leading exponents claimed it possessed.

The author is, then, keen to highlight how far both men's work has privileged the singular, formal content of the text over the many and various ways it might be informally read. This means, Epstein believes, they have both made a serious mistake in disregarding the continued importance of class sentiment within popular politics. He elaborates on the reasons why historians need to place text into context, and how they may accomplish this task in four chapters each of which tackles differing aspects of the subject, all seeking to underline the vitality of class feeling and liberalism's limited purchase. Perhaps the most important of these chapters contrasts the significance of the role of the 'gentleman leader' in early 19th-century radicalism and Gladstonian liberalism.

Epstein suggests that what has often been an unpleasantly antagonistic debate has resulted partly because most linguistic turners wanted to exaggerate how different their approach was to that of the 'founding fathers' of cultural materialism. They laboured under that obligation only because Thompson had so obviously influenced their own earlier work. Epstein's implication is that there is actually more common ground than the debate has hitherto allowed for. Yet, while Epstein is happy to praise both Stedman Jones and Joyce when he thinks they are right and expresses any criticism in a guarded manner, this collection will probably not lead to reconciliation. In the introduction Epstein cites Raymond Williams with approval (as had Thompson) on the matter of language. Williams said language should be seen as but one element among many in the structuring of human agency but was not by itself constitutive: only idealists believed that. All the world is, then, Epstein suggests, not a text; there is such a thing as context, something that is material, precedes the text, and conditions its creation and interpretation. Thus, workers in the 19th century — for whom 'class' remained a lived, real thing —could interpret the meaning of words to best reflect their material interests rather than allowing themselves to be constructed by words. However moderately he may make this point, rather than building a middle ground, Epstein's work merely highlights a decisive difference of opinion that looks set to match cultural materialist against linguistic turner for some years to come.


Steven Fielding University of Salford

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