Wenige Wochen nach dem plötzlichen Ableben seines Direktors, Professor A. J. C. Rüter, hat das Internationale Institut für Sozial-geschichte am 1. Oktober 1965 mit dem Tode Werner Blumenbergs, des Leiters der Deutschland-Abteilung, einen zweiten schweren Verlust erlitten.

One of the by-products of the Keynesian Revolution has been a painstaking search for precursors of Keynes. Diligent academics have compiled an impressive array of “proto-Keynesians”, although some have only slender claims to the title. There has been a preoccupation with those writers whose contributions were exclusively theoretical. This bias is surprising in view of the nature of Keynes' own approach which was to progress from policy prescription to theory. The “proto-Keynesians” in general failed to proceed to Keynesian policy prescriptions, being unable to withstand the attacks of orthodox theorists; yet some commentators, ignorant of theoretical niceties, intuitively arrived at policy programmes which Keynes later endorsed. This latter group placed particular emphasis on public works programmes as a method of combating unemployment. Economists have credited the Liberal Party, J. M. Keynes and H. D. Henderson with being the first, in the inter-war years, to emphasise public works as one solution to the problem of chronic unemployment. Klein, examining Keynes' and Henderson's arguments in support of the Liberal Party's 1929 General Election commitment to a public works programme, states that “no one was thinking seriously along these lines at the time of the Great Depression.” Most other commentators have stressed the original nature of the Liberal programme of 1929, notably Harrod, Macgregor and Dillard. The purpose of this paper is to indicate the contribution of the Labour movement to the inter-war discussion of public works. It is contended that there has been undue emphasis on the Liberal Party's literature of the 1920S and early 1030s. In fact, the Liberal programme was in many respects similar to that which had been expounded by trade unionists and the Labour Party since 1917. To establish this argument it is necessary, first, to outline the historical background against which the inter-war discussion of public works took place.

Recent interest in the social conditions which underlay the emergence in Britain of independent labour politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century has thrown a good deal of light on the Labour Church movement. Dr. E. J. Hobsbawm, in a characteristically stimulating chapter of his Primitive Rebels, set the Labour Churches within the context of the “labour sects” which he isolates as a phenomenon of nineteenth century Britain and defines as “proletarian organisations and aspirations of a sort expressed through traditional religious ideology”. The concentration of academic attention on the Labour Church has given rise to the mention of a little known phenomenon of the British working-class movement, Socialist Sunday Schools which, it is usually suggested, were little more than a fringe activity of the Labour Churches. It is the object of this paper to give some account of the history of Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain until 1939 and to suggest that they too constitute a “labour sect” cognate with the Labour Church but organisationally and geographically distinct from it and therefore representing an extension of the working-class sectarian tradition beyond the limits of the nineteenth century within which Hobsbawn seems to confine it.

Socialist thinking and political activity took root in the Balkans in the period between the revolutions of 1848–49 and the Congress of Berlin, and for nearly a century historians have interpreted the phenomenon as an extension of contemporary developments in Russia. This position, entrenched in Russian historiography prior to 1917, became the official view of Soviet historians. Neither in the inter-war period nor since 1945 have any alternative interpretations been produced by Balkan scholars.

Um den Lebensstandard der Bevölkerung in Deutschland vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zu erforschen, kann man versuchen, ihn nach den Haushaltseinkommen zu quantifizieren, und prüfen, wie er sich im Lauf der Zeit verbessert oder verschlechtert. Das ist oft erfolglos, weil die Quellen versagen. Dann kann man versuchen, die verschiedenen sozialen Stufen der Lebenshaltung zu qualifizieren, und darstellen, wie ihr Zuschnitt und ihr Verhältnis untereinander sich im Lauf der Zeit auf den einzelnen Stufen verschiedenartig verändert.