Theodore Zeldin, FRANCE 1848–1945, Vol. 1: Ambition, Love and Politics . (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), vii + 823 pp.

minated in the New Constitution of the party which was promulgated in 1918. But it is in the consideration of his third argument concerning ideology and class consciousness that the weakness of Dr. McKibbon's essentially institutional analysis shows through. The most controversial element in the New Constitution was Clause Four, urging collective ownership of the means of production and democratic control of industry. The author is no doubt right to reemphasize that Jimmy Thomas, Havelock Wilson and other right-wing trade union leaders, as ardent patriots in the war, were basically opposed to collectivism as an ideology. He may well also be right to point out that they accepted Clause Four reluctantly as the price they had to pay in order to maintain control of the Labour Party. But it is going too far to suggest that Clause Four was inserted simply "as a sop to the professional bourgeoisie" (p. 97). After all it was not primarily Fabian or other middle class radical votes which swelled the Labour total in the December 1918 election from a pre-war figure of half a million to 2,374,000. It was the votes of hundreds of thousands of ordinary workingmen who had been disaffected by a multiplicity of factors war-weariness, inflation, strikes, the Irish upheaval, Bolshevism, perhaps even the ongoing religious decline of Nonconformity which Dr. McKibbon's largely institutional analysis by definition cannot touch. The difficulty comes out most clearly in what the author regards as his "paradoxical" conclusion that "one of the most highly class-conscious working classes in the world produced a party whose appeal was intended to be classless". This is only a paradox if one neglects to recognize the fact that most trade union leaders are likely to be economist in their outlook most of the time, and then assumes the motivation of the rank-and-file to be identical to that of the leaders. On the scanty evidence of the failure of the Daily Herald to succeed as a mass, socialist paper, Dr. McKibbon concludes that the British working classes were incapable of being aroused by a genuinely class-conscious form of appeal. This not only makes it extremely difficult to explain just why the Labour vote jumped so dramatically in the coupon election of 1918. It also ignores the kind of detailed, cultural analysis of the constituent elements of working class consciousness which John Foster attempted in his Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, without which the kind of conclusions to which Dr. McKibbon comes can only be taken on trust.