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Andrea Costa, a contemporary observer and sometime participant in Italian socialist politics, spoke in 1886 in defense of the Lombardy-based Partito operaio, whose leaders had been arrested and its newspaper muzzled. He offered a classic Marxist interpretation of the party's emergence as a "natural product of… our economic and social conditions … the concentration of the means of production in few hands, distancing the worker more and more from his tools … and likewise a product of our political conditions … electoral reform, by means of which the working class … can affirm itself as a class apart." Further, this party had been founded in Milan, "where modern industry has penetrated more than elsewhere," and closely following the expansion of the suffrage in 1881 (Italy 1886: 419).

Ira Katznelson's evocative and stimulating essay is an effort to chart how we got from there to here and to point to new directions in which labor history might fruitfully move. By some irony of coincidence (or, more likely, by a logic that easily could be traced) I was at all the events he mentions (except the recent "ambitious talk by a political theorist"—I was out of town that day), even the founding meeting of the European Labor and Working-Class History group and newsletter convened by Robert Wheeler at the American Historical Association 1971 Annual Meeting.I also read most of the key articles and books he cites at about the same time he did. My reading of this history and the present situation of labor history differs from his not because I disagree with the facts about labor history, but because I disagree with the scope of the epistemological debate behind its "loss of elan, directionality, and intellectual purpose." Thus the fact that labor history is not in crisis, as he insists, must be extended to history in general, with the caveat that an epistemological debate is going on not just in labor history, but throughout the discipline of history, including women's history.