The Agrarian Roots of Working-Class Radicalism: An Assessment of the Mann–Giddens Thesis

Of the studies by British sociologists in the last decade focusing on the determinants of working-class attitudes to the class structure, those of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens must, I think, be seen in retrospect as the most imaginative. While much effort at the time focused on what in the event turned out to be the rather minimal implications of the impact of certain variations in work and community milieux within Britain on workers' conceptions of class, Mann and Giddens took as their point of departure the well documented differences in the radicalism of the labour movements of different Western capitalist societies and sought to develop a theory that could account for them. Why should it be, they asked, that in countries such as France and Italy workers were sufficiently disenchanted with capitalist institutions to give relatively enduring support to parties that were at least formally committed to revolutionary objectives, while in countries such as Britain and the United States they gave their allegiances to parties that seemed largely to accept the existing structure of society?