Linking the fate of labor and working-class history to the temporal fortunes of socialist parties or the collapse of the communist system seems to reduce history to a very meager function. It suggests that labor has somehow lost importance or interest as a historical subject because the political parties and movements which claimed to speak in its name have experienced drastic reversals or other profound changes.Apparently historians have periodically and repeatedly had to confront such narrow present-mindedness.Katznelson dwells on this sense of loss which he sees reflected in how “far more rapidly” the “agenda defended by Hobsbawm and Hill… has taken on something of the quaint feel of antiquarianism.”