The related developments of the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party have been subjected to considerable scrutiny by historians of modern Britain. Their work has, however, had the effect of stimulating new controversies rather than of establishing a consensus view as to the reasons for this fundamental change in British political life.

The change in the social background of university students in nineteenth-century Russia, and in particular the “arrival of the raznochinets”, to use Mikhailovskii's celebrated term, have long been considered a major turning-point in Russian social history and a watershed in the development of the revolutionary movement. Historians have often attributed to it the chief role in producing the evolution of ideological attitudes between the “Fathers” of the 1840's and the “Sons” of the 1860's and the upsurge in radical agitation in the universities on the eve of the Emancipation of the Serfs.

Im Paragraphen 2 der Misère de la philosophie führt Marx in der Polemik gegen Proudhon drei Titel von englischen „Sozialisten” an, in denen längst vor Proudhon „die egalitäre Anwendung der Ricardoschen Theorie” vorgeschlagen worden sei:

Nous pourrions citer à M. Proudhon: l'Économie politique de Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson: An Inquiry into the Principles of the distribution of wealth, most conducive to human happiness, 1824; T. R. Edmonds: Practical, moral and political Economy, 1828; etc., etc., et quatre pages d'etc.