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Geoff Eley's A Crooked Line defies classification in existing genres of historical writing. It partakes of intellectual history, memoir, theoretical treatise, and political tract without being quite any of these; it embodies the sort of experiment with form that Eley praises in the work of Carolyn Steedman, one of his historiographical heroines. Its deepest affinity seems to be with the work of the British Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams, whose name and example emerge again and again at crucial points in the text. Eley's argumentation and in fact his very sentences have the slow, complex, dialectical, and ruminative quality that one has learned to associate with Williams—he is never quick to judge, always aware of the many‐sidedness of the problem at hand, theoretically alert but wary of abstraction, ever reflective about his own historical placement within the argumentative complex, yet firm and consistent in his Marxist‐humanist moral and political bearing. Eley's book displays an admirable realism and humility in the face of the many surprises and disappointments that have troubled the historical experience of the “sixties generation” and a willingness to learn both from that experience and from other people whose judgments and perspectives are different from his own.

One of Eley's purposes is to show what it means to be both intellectually ambitious and politically engaged as a historian. “My hope,” he writes, “is that mapping a series of personal encounters between the tasks of historical writing and the surrounding political climate may make it possible for others to recognize their own analogous accounts, whether converging with mine or not” (6). Eley makes it clear that the problems of historical engagement reach to the core of the historian's emotional being: the chapters of the book, after the initial “Becoming a Historian,” have titles that evoke changes in Eley's dominant feelings about history and politics over time: “Optimism,” “Disappointment,” “Reflectiveness,” and “Defiance.” Eley says he became a historian “because history really mattered; it was necessary for making a difference” (ix). He has sustained this motivation through all the twists and turns (a crooked line, as he puts it) of both world politics and professional historiography during the course of his career. The book is, among other things, an eloquent testimony to history as a moral calling; students contemplating a career in our discipline should read it and take it to heart.

The chief subject matter of the book is the two great historiographical movements that have reshaped the profession since Eley began his undergraduate work at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1967: the rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and the turn to cultural history in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Eley's account of these transformations is written from the standpoint of his own career and his own engagements as a historian and is, hence, biased toward European history, particularly German and British, with an emphasis on history written from a left‐of‐center perspective. (His extended discussion of the rise and triumph of social history in Germany, and its eventual challenge by Alltagsgeschichte, is particularly masterful.) The range of reading and historiographical reference is, however, very wide, and the book includes shrewd observations on American, French, and South Asian historiography. Nor do other disciplines escape his gaze: Eley comments on developments in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and literary criticism, all of which, as he notes, have played crucial roles in the transformation of historical writing and research, including his own, over the past four decades. His footnotes, which take up nearly a third of the book, are a goldmine of references and commentary.

Eley was himself a participant in both of the great historiographical movements he narrates. Entering graduate school (at the University of Sussex) in 1971, he was part of the generation that rode the rising tide of social history. In his English milieu, social history was fundamentally Marxist in orientation—strongly influenced by E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, Christopher Hill, and other British Marxist historians. However, as Eley points out, the other major schools of social history—the French Annales school and international but especially American social science history—had highly convergent programs. All were in search of what Charles Tilly pithily termed Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons; all had the ambition of grasping historical totality; all were open to interdisciplinary collaboration with other social sciences; and all were committed to an essentially materialist model of explanation in which economic structures held pride of place.1 Rather than rivals, the three styles of social history seemed collaborators on a common project.

But social history had no sooner gained hegemony in the historical profession (toward the end of the 1970s) than some of its leading practitioners began to assert the insufficiency of materialist explanation and to emphasize instead the importance of cultural structures and processes. Over the course of the 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s, what came to be called cultural history overtook social history as the leading edge of scholarship—but not without some fierce struggles. Like the social history movement, this linguistic or cultural turn in history was international in scope and profoundly interdisciplinary. But the disciplinary partners shifted from sociology, political science, geography, and economics to anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism. Just as the social history movement was deeply influenced by populist or socialist political aspirations, the cultural history movement was pushed forward by a new set of political passions—by feminism, most decisively, but also by identity movements around race and ethnicity. At the same time, the declining plausibility of totalizing socialist utopias converged with a new concern for the local and for questions of personal identity. The search for big structures gave way to microhistories and histories of subjectivity; meanwhile the certainties of structural explanatory strategies were corroded by the poststructuralisms of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan and by the vogue for postmodernism. Eley, while never a prime advocate of these changes, was certainly sympathetic to the new sensibility of cultural history; at the same time, he never renounced the perspectives of social history.2 Now, at the beginning of the twenty‐first century, when the novelty of cultural history and the linguistic turn has begun to wear off, Eley ends his book with a plea for theoretical and methodological pluralism: “between social and cultural history,” he concludes, “there is no need to choose” (181).3

The book stimulates two lines of rumination. First, as Eley hoped it would, his story has prompted me to think about how my historiographical and political engagements resembled and differed from his. His account is, at one level, immediately recognizable to any historian who has lived through these years. But it is also very particular. I, for one, was struck by how Anglo‐centric Eley's attachments and judgments continue to be, after his nearly thirty years at the University of Michigan. The three superb intellectual portraits of historians that he uses to conclude his central chapters—Edward Thompson for “Optimism,” Tim Mason for “Disappointment,” and Carolyn Steedman for “Reflectiveness”—are all English, as is Raymond Williams, Eley's most consistent point of theoretical reference, and Eric Hobsbawm, whose “History of Society” slogan is one of Eley's organizing tropes. As an American‐born historian who has struggled through the same general succession of historiographical changes, I find that the specificity of this English standpoint serves to highlight specificities of my American experience. Comparing the crooked lines marked out by these two trajectories poses questions about how we should understand the relationship between historical context and historiographical changes over the past four decades.

My second rumination, apparently unrelated but in fact closely linked to the first, arises from a sense of dissatisfaction with Eley's stance in the historiographical present, particularly in his final chapter, “Defiance.” It is, of course, difficult to know quite how to judge or to criticize a book so utterly sui generis as this one. As a report on Eley's own ambivalent feelings about contemporary politics and historiography, his concluding chapter is as eloquent as those that precede it. Yet I find his claim of defiance out of step with his seemingly uncritical stance toward the currently dominant style of historiographical practice, what is commonly labeled “the new cultural history.” I believe that leftist historians can be productively defiant in the dispiriting political conjuncture of the early twenty‐first century, but that it will require some hard theoretical labor on our part. We need both to find a theoretically satisfactory way of overcoming the current divide between social and cultural history and to recognize how our own efforts to rethink history are conditioned by contemporary transformations in global capitalism.

The crooked line of my own historiographical development broadly parallels Eley's. It was, moreover, tightly intertwined with his for a while. When I taught at the University of Michigan in the later 1980s, Geoff Eley and I were both members of the steering committee of the Program on the Comparative Study of Social Transformation. CSST, as it was called, was an explicitly interdisciplinary program including historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and literary scholars. It was the prime site of the discussions (and hammer‐and‐tong intellectual battles) that accompanied the linguistic or cultural turn in Ann Arbor in those years—and a perfect example of the sort of dialogue between disciplines and theoretical perspectives that Eley properly identifies as a potent source of historiographical innovation. During the heady days of our joint involvement in CSST, our historical lines tracked each other's very closely.

But if we generally saw eye to eye in those years, our previous historiographical and political development had been quite different. Although I am ten years older than Eley, I, too, was deeply influenced by the politics of the 1960s. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of New‐Dealer parents. For me, coming of age in the 1950s, the burning issue was not the workers' struggles but civil liberties and civil rights. The first political cause I strongly identified with was the “Joe Must Go” campaign—an unsuccessful attempt in 1954 (when I was fourteen) to recall Joseph McCarthy, my state's junior senator. During my college years at the University of Wisconsin, the dominant issue was the civil rights movement. Even during my graduate school years at Berkeley, it was a kind of radical left‐liberalism rather than Marxism that defined the political terrain. The free speech movement of 1964, defending the right of students to organize on campus for civil rights activism, was the great galvanizing event. Issues other than free speech and civil rights of course arose in ensuing years—most importantly, opposition to the War in Vietnam. The Bay Area was also at the center of “lifestyle” cultural radicalism in the 1960s: experimentation with psychedelic drugs, the San Francisco rock music scene, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, communes, challenges to conventional sex roles—the entire panoply of what we called “the expansion of consciousness.” In Berkeley in the 1960s, the venerable liberal right to the pursuit of happiness was given a powerful new impetus. By contrast, Marxism, while present in the vibrant politics of Berkeley, was hardly central.

I arrived at Berkeley determined to study social history. My outlook partook of the default economic determinism of the moment, yet I was not a Marxist. I read and was thrilled by E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class in the winter of 1964, when I was developing my dissertation project in labor history. But what impressed me most in the book was Thompson's depiction of the enormous diversity in circumstances and attitudes within the laboring population, and especially his demonstration that artisans took the leading role in the workers' struggles. For me, Thompson's book served as a welcome blow against the then‐conventional Marxist argument in labor history—that worker radicalism resulted from the growth of a uniform factory proletariat. Thompson's findings seemed to me consonant with detailed quantitative studies of the relationship between social structure and political engagements by sociologically inspired scholars such as Stephan Thernstrom and Charles Tilly.4 In European, and specifically French, labor history, Marxism seemed the dead hand of tradition, not the cutting edge. By contrast, liberal American social science offered valuable tools for getting at the social origins of nineteenth‐century worker radicalism.5

My lack of political or intellectual commitment to Marxism undoubtedly made my subsequent move to cultural history easier. Although my common sense was materialist, my materialism lacked political weight. When my University of Chicago colleagues Bernard Cohn and Ronald Inden introduced me to the wonders of symbolic anthropology in the early 1970s, I had no political reason to resist. Besides, I was growing frustrated with the limitations of quantitative social history, which could indeed reconstruct social structures in exquisite detail, but which remained silent about what people felt or believed. Approaches borrowed from anthropology were attractive because they promised to yield deep insights into the meaning of workers' utterances and collective action. But for me, this desire to discover people's cultural meanings also had a charge that went beyond the purely intellectual. I had been vaguely aware ever since graduate school that the quantitative techniques definitive of social history had a complicated political valence. On the one hand, they had a certain democratic implication because they seemed the best means of getting at the experiences of the sort of people—for example, workers and peasants—who rarely left behind written sources. But on the other hand, quantification was redolent of precisely the bureaucratic corporate mentality that the counterculture of the 1960s found deeply objectionable. Taking on the intellectual perspective of cultural anthropology not only produced new data about workers: it seemed positively liberating. Rather than being limited by a narrow and bureaucratic form of research that gave me access only to the outward forms of working‐class life, I could now explore the surprising and wonderfully variegated realms of workers' symbolic life—effectively, their consciousness and collective unconscious. These new forms of research revealed alternate moral universes by no means reducible to the facts of occupational structure, wage rates, and degrees of economic exploitation. For me, and I think for many other historians of my generation, cultural history resonated with the yearnings of the 1960s counterculture. I certainly never renounced quantitative history, but from the mid‐1970s forward I began to regard quantification more as an ancillary technique than as the royal road to historical truth.6

Up to this point in my career, I had been rather dismissive of Marxism as a framework for social history, on the grounds that it tended so strongly toward reductionism.7 But during the late 1970s and the 1980s, I began slowly to revise this position. Getting to know the Marxist economists David Gordon, Herb Gintis, and Rick Edwards and the Marxist art historian Tim Clark during my years at the Institute for Advanced Study in the late 1970s and participating in a Marxist study group at the University of Arizona in the 1980s made it clear that my grasp of Marxism had been utterly superficial and that I had a lot to learn. So by the time my crooked line began to overlap with Eley's in Ann Arbor in the later 1980s, my appreciation of Marxism had risen considerably. At the same time, political developments in the 1980s, particularly Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain, made it clear that class war, of the rich against the poor, was alive and well. The wrenching changes in the U.S. economy—massive deindustrialization, the shift of power from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West, the globalization of finance—made issues of economic structure and change seem absolutely urgent. Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was seen by many commentators as marking the definitive end of Marxism, seemed to me to liberate Marx from the grotesque totalitarian regime that had falsely claimed to incarnate his ideas. Thus, during the time we worked in tandem at the University of Michigan, Eley and I were both eclectics, drawn simultaneously by exciting innovations in cultural theory and an appreciation of Marxist perspectives. And since our formal partnership ended in 1990, when I moved back to the University of Chicago, both of us have continued to look for ways simultaneously to embrace social history, Marxism, and cultural history. Both Eley and I have taken defiant political postures in the face of the left's political difficulties since 1980, refusing to accept the seeming triumph of global capitalism and plutocratic democracy as anything like the “end of history.” For the time being, at least, our lines continue to advance, however crookedly, in roughly parallel directions.

Any reader of Eley will recognize this thumbnail sketch of my historiographical development as in some sense a variant of his. The differences in our trajectories—for example, Eley's early commitment to Marxism and my early liberalism or my more precocious and emphatic linguistic turn—are easy to explain by our particular biographies. But what about the similarities, which clearly were shared by many historians in our broad generation, not only in North America and Europe, but in South Asia as well?8 In all of these places, there was an upsurge of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by a move to cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s. The timing and the particular details varied, of course, but the sequence has been surprisingly uniform.

Although Eley discusses a wide range of national historiographies, he rarely steps back to consider the reasons for this wider transnational pattern. It is paradoxical that while he consistently advocates retaining social history's totalizing ambition, he fails to pursue this ambition in his own historical account of recent historiography. He gives us a fine‐grained analysis of intellectual movements in the discipline and relates these to ongoing political struggles, but fails to relate them to the development of global capitalism—which, for him as a Marxist, would seem to have defined, or at least participated importantly in defining, the social totality within which both historians and political actors were constrained to act.

About the only general claim that Eley makes about the initial rise of social history is that “the radical politics of the sixties were inseparable from the historiographical story. The breakthrough to social history was unimaginable without the sense of political possibility beckoning during the later 1960s” (59). The radical political movements called up by the metonym “1968” were, of course, famously international, and this quasi‐global radicalism certainly fired the imaginations of many social historians in the making. But in my opinion, 1968 is better understood as giving a particular spin to a historiographical movement that was already well under way. When I arrived in Berkeley in 1962, many graduate students, myself included, were already planning to work in social history; by 1968, we were well into our dissertations. Instead of seeing the political radicalism of the late 1960s as a necessary antecedent to the “breakthrough to social history,” I think this breakthrough and the ubiquitous radical movements of these years must both be seen as arising from deeper social causes. Elaborating a full argument to this effect would take much more space than I have here. But I think that the epistemological optimism of social history—its faith in the possibility of reconstructing a history of the social totality—was made plausible in large part by the specific form of capitalist development that characterized the great worldwide postwar capitalist boom. So‐called “Fordist” or state‐centered capitalism, with its fundamental pact between big business, big labor, and big government, its standardized mass production, its Keynesian steering of the economy, its fixed exchange rates, and its global guarantee by United States military power, had produced, or at least seemed to have produced, a graspable, predictable, and steadily progressing form of society. To use Raymond Williams's language, one might say that the “structure of experience” generated by postwar capitalism underwrote the plausibility of social history, whether in its Marxist, its Annaliste, or its social‐scientific form.9

But so, in a different but related way, did Fordist capitalism underwrite the 1960s revolts. Those revolts were spearheaded by young people, and more specifically by university students. As Daniel Bell pointed out in The Coming of Post‐Industrial Society, the type of capitalism that arose in the postwar boom in the wealthy countries was increasingly dependent on the production and management of knowledge.10 This required a better‐trained labor force, which entailed a vast expansion of the university systems in all advanced democracies. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, university students made up a far higher proportion of their age cohorts than ever before. They were generally ensured of good jobs once they graduated, were confident about the future, were living independently without adult responsibilities, and were supplied with inexpensive paperbacks and new and effective birth‐control technologies. Although university students were clearly beneficiaries of the Fordist boom, universities also afforded them the social space and intellectual resources to develop a critical political culture and to experiment with new lifestyles. The student milieu combined the optimism that grew out of the apparently permanent prosperity of the postwar boom with a highly critical attitude toward the form of capitalism that in fact enabled that prosperity. The student radicals' rhetoric and their mode of life was quite specifically anti‐Fordist—especially hostile to bureaucracy, corporate conformity, and mass culture. It seems fair to conclude that the student movements of the 1960s were deeply embedded in the contradictions of Fordist capitalism, at once dependent on its promises of endless prosperity and insistently pointing beyond it to a less stultifying form of life that its very material abundance made thinkable. In short, understanding the rise of either social history or the radical movements of the 1960s—both of them clearly transnational phenomena—can be enhanced by showing how these phenomena were linked to the broad forms and dynamics of global capitalism in their eras.

I think Eley's account of the cultural turn suffers from the same sort of problem as his account of the initial rise of social history. Again his story combines intellectual and political history via personal narrative, but it contains little reflection about the macrosocial environment in which the historiographical changes took place. In the course of his account, Eley mentions two aspects of the sociopolitical environment of the late 1970s and 1980s that undermined social history's modes of explanation. On the one hand, “class was weakening in its persuasiveness as a master concept” (100), largely because of the decline of the labor movement internationally after about 1976 and the shocking victory, with significant working‐class support, of a viciously anti‐labor Thatcherist Conservative Party in Britain in 1979 and again in 1983.11 The other was the rise of feminism, a political and intellectual movement that no self‐respecting leftist could ignore, but that, by the 1980s, was insisting that “fundamental areas of social life simply couldn't be subsumed into the analytical terms of class” (98). For a British social historian whose view of the social totality was premised on class, this was indeed a potent combination. But here Eley's account is too local to make sense of the overall historiographical and political conjuncture. The weakening of the labor movement certainly was discouraging for the left everywhere, and feminism everywhere posed conundrums for the implicitly masculinist assumptions of social history and leftist politics. But for social historians not strongly cathected to class as an analytical category—for example, American social‐science historians like me or French Annalistes—the fading plausibility of class explanation was a matter of relative indifference and therefore cannot explain their turn to cultural history.

In my opinion, the decline no less than the rise of social history must be connected to the changing macrosocial forms and fortunes of world capitalism. The postwar boom that underwrote both the rise of social history and the political‐cultural revolts of the 1960s ceased abruptly in the early 1970s, and the world economy entered a period of sustained structural crisis. It was not just that economic growth slowed, but that the underlying structures of Fordist capitalism came unraveled over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Industrial heartlands became “rust belts.” Keynesianism, which could not solve the riddle of “stagflation,” gave way to monetarism and microeconomics. The system of pegged exchange rates collapsed, making way for the hypertrophic growth of “off‐shore” currency speculation, enhanced, of course, by the new electronic communications technologies. Financial services replaced manufacturing as the leading sector in the wealthiest countries. Labor unions declined in power and numbers. Corporations themselves metamorphosed from hierarchically structured “national champions” to much more loosely structured “multinationals” that, taking advantage of the new electronic communications technology, could locate manufacturing, back‐office work, and technical services wherever they could be performed most cheaply. At all levels of the occupational hierarchy, both for managers and for production workers, job security and the well‐defined career ladder were eroded, as workers increasingly experienced a kind of occupational picaresque, featuring lateral movement between firms, bouts of temporary work, self‐employment, and frequent retraining. International trade surged, as did international labor migration, both legal and illegal. Nation‐states were ever less capable of controlling the economic activities that went on within their boundaries; indeed, some have claimed that the very notion of a “national economy” ceased to make sense. The state‐centered sociopolitical imaginary of the postwar era, with its confidence in state economic steering, growing welfare‐state benefits, guarantees of full employment, and state‐led cooperation between labor and capital, lost its hold. This older political imaginary was gradually and unevenly displaced by a rising “neoliberal” political imaginary, one that exalted individual responsibility, universal entrepreneurship, privatization, deregulation, and globalization.

It is puzzling that an avowed Marxist such as Eley never asks how the epistemic practices of historians might have been affected by such a fundamental transformation of the social forms of world capitalism. Most obviously, if the consolidation of Fordism in the 1950s and 1960s made social structures seem graspable, predictable, and quantifiable, it makes sense that the unraveling of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s undermined the plausibility of the social history paradigm. By the later 1970s, not only politics and social structure but even personal identities seemed disconcertingly up for grabs. When historians turned from the pursuit of big structures to microhistory, from socioeconomic determinism to studies of culture, from master processes to the sources of subjective identity, this search for new forms of intelligibility in the past reflected the difficulties of making sense of a present in which Fordist capitalism had disintegrated and was being replaced by the more fluid and unpredictable forms of an emerging global neoliberalism.12 Nor was it only historians who, in these years, eschewed the reified categories of the previous intellectual era. Anthropologists abandoned the conventions of preexisting ethnography; literary critics adopted deconstruction; postmodernism became a rallying cry across a whole range of academic disciplines. Even social scientists who continued to embrace mathematics and scientific method reflected this tendency to eschew reified structures and rebuild their disciplines from the ground up. Rational choice, with its stringent assumption of methodological individualism, made great strides in economics and political science. And in sociology, the new methodology of social network analysis insisted that social structures could not be simply posited, but had to be built up laboriously from the social interactions out of which they were ultimately constituted. The era of transition from Fordist or state‐centered capitalism to the globalized capitalism of neoliberalism was characterized all across the human sciences by a general epistemic uncertainty—an uncertainty that has a certain elective affinity with the heightened “flexibility” that is one of the hallmarks of the new global economic order.13 In history, this uncertainty took the form of the cultural turn, flirtations with poststructuralism, and a fascination with microhistory and subjectivity.

In the 1980s and the 1990s, many historians were intoxicated by the sense that the linguistic turn had liberated them from the stifling frameworks and static politics of social history. But that mood seemed to change as global neoliberalism consolidated itself around the turn of the new millennium. The spectacle of soaring executive salaries combined with stagnant wages, the increasingly apparent erosion of democracy by plutocracy, and the unambiguous exaltation of exchange value over all other forms of value have inspired a kind of nostalgia for social history—which, for all its failings, at least attempted to wrestle with the problem of large‐scale socioeconomic transformations. Eley, with his current mood of political defiance and his affirmation of the continuing value of social history, is a prominent example. He might be a bellwether of a coming historiographical trend; it is too early to know.

Eley's slogan for the current era of “defiance” is that “between social history and cultural history, there is really no need to choose” (181). His basic desire, if I understand him properly, is entirely laudable: to revive social history's effort to grasp (capitalist) social totality without giving up the immense intellectual gains made possible by the cultural turn. But if the goal is laudable, I do not find Eley's final chapter very effective at pointing the way—above all, in my opinion, because he has not found a theoretical perspective adequate to the task.

At one level, Eley's claim that there is no need to choose turns out to be little more than an expression of satisfaction with the sort of work being done at present under the banner of “the new cultural history.” In this formulation, the admonition to retain social history is weak, since it is far from clear whether anything worthy of the name of social history is currently on offer. Thus Eley declares at one point that social history “simply isn't available any more,” that it has “ceased to exist” as a coherent project, and that each element of its paradigm “has succumbed to relentless and compelling critique” (189). Nothing remains, Eley implies, but fragmentary themes or topics drifting free of the old social history paradigm. Near the very end of the book, he argues that by the late 1990s, “the new cultural history,” now the “broadly accepted description” for the best work going on in the field, had actually become an “eclectic repertoire of approaches and themes” whose boundary with social history was “extraordinarily more blurred.” Here Eley celebrates younger historians' ability to muddle through, to find, under the banner of the new cultural history, concrete ways of combining social and cultural themes and topics while avoiding “the programmatic advocacy of one authorizing form of theory against another.” He praises the “hybridity” of the “new cultural history” for enabling historians to set theory aside and get on with a wide range of interesting empirical work (201).

But these rather uncritical paragraphs are followed by another that points in a quite different direction. “Some confidence,” Eley writes, “needs to be regained in the possibility of grasping society as a whole, of theorizing its bases of cohesion and instability, and of analyzing its forms of motion” (201–202). Here Eley indicates, I believe, his most deep‐seated reason for continuing to advocate a combination of social and cultural history: his appreciation of social history's sense of the social totality. In one mood, he seems content that various themes and topics recognizably derived from the now‐shattered social history paradigm can find their place in the shapeless bazaar of the new cultural history. But in another mood, he is discontented that historians have abandoned their efforts to grasp social totality. Yet even then he remains diffident, as indicated by the far from ringing plea that “some confidence needs to be regained in the possibility of grasping society as a whole.” He goes on to say that “neither skepticism about the persuasiveness of grand narratives nor critiques of Enlightenment thinking require altogether abandoning the project of societywide analysis or societal history” (202; my emphasis). He then admits that “for my own part, I've continued thinking in terms of capitalism, class, the nation, social formation, and so forth.” He has not, in other words, “altogether abandoned” his Marxist categories. “But,” he continues, “I am far more cautious and uncertain about exactly what these grand‐theoretical concepts can allow me to discuss and explain.” The paragraph that began with a call to revive social history's effort to grasp social totality ends not with an affirmation of the confidence he says must be restored, but with reflections on the historical contingency of the very concepts, such as class and society, by which totality might be grasped (202).14

Yet in the book's final paragraph, Eley puts the ambivalence behind him to suggest “defiance” as “the appropriate response for our new contemporary moment.” In an era beset by grand narratives of neoliberalism and “brutally demonizing rhetorics about good and evil in the world,” he suggests that we (by which he means leftist historians) need to develop metanarratives of our own, “new ‘histories of society’” (203). I entirely agree with this conclusion. But I think that defiance must be more than an attitude, and that any attempt at writing new histories of society (with the totalizing ambitions Eley intends) must face head‐on some theoretical difficulties that Eley avoids in this book.

I see two fundamental theoretical problems. First, it is necessary to work out in theoretical terms some means of combining, on the same epistemological terrain, the materialism of “social history” and the idealism of “cultural history.” In a recent book, I have offered my own attempt at such a theoretical reconceptualization. I begin by denying that all social relations are reducible to language, but argue that because all social relations have a meaningful content, they can nevertheless be grasped by a modified or expanded version of the linguistic model. I try to show that the whole range of human behaviors—for example, such activities as work, sex, cooking, currency speculation, or basketball—can profitably be understood as constituted by a web of “semiotic practices.” I also argue that if the implications of such an approach are followed out correctly, we will find that interconnected semiotic practices accumulate into what I call “built environments”—materially existing and spatially located physical and social fabrics that endure but are also transformed by continuing flows of semiotic practice. This theoretical framework may or may not seem promising, but it explicitly goes beyond a mere attitude of defiance to meld social and cultural history into a conceptually coherent and unified historiographical project.15

The second necessary theoretical task is to rethink the problem of social totality. The striking and often brutal transformations of capitalist social relations since the 1970s have helped convince me that capitalism is the crucial horizon of social totality, not only in the present, but in the entire modern era. From this it follows that rethinking social totality requires an engagement with Marxism, since, in my opinion, it is adherents of this tradition who have thought most deeply and productively about capitalism. My own predilections within Marxist debate differ, I believe, from Eley's. I read his remarks on Marxism in A Crooked Line to imply that for him, class is the fundamental category of Marxist analysis. I would tend to emphasize the endless accumulation of capital as forming the crucial underlying dynamic of capitalism, with class and class struggle figuring more as a context and outcome of the dynamic of accumulation. In capital‐centered Marxist theories, the endless accumulation of capital produces changing historical configurations of political power, spatial relations, class struggles, intellectual forms, technology, and systems of economic regulation that endure for a certain time until they are dismantled by their own contradictions and replaced by new configurations.16 As I see it, these reconfigurations of capitalism are as much cultural as material processes—evolving sets of semiotic practices and at the same time evolving “built environments.” The difference between these two conceptions of capitalism is, I believe, consequential for rethinking social totality. It was, after all, the class‐centric model of social totality that withered under the assaults of neoliberal capitalist restructuring and feminist theory in the late 1970s and 1980s; I think that conceptions of social totality centered on endless accumulation (such as the one I have attempted, however crudely, to sketch out above in my account of the global capitalist transformations following the 1970s) will prove much less vulnerable.

Geoff Eley's A Crooked Line is a powerful stimulus to reflection on the political entailments and theoretical challenges of history—both as written and as lived. It goes without saying that not everyone will agree with his judgments. As I have indicated, I think that finding a way forward from the current historiographical perplexity will require a stronger dose of theory and a different sort of theory than Eley has offered. But he has masterfully sketched out the terrain on which the debates must take place.