Unifying concepts are essential to the study of history, enabling students and scholars to organize their ideas, research and writing. However, such concepts are also the focus of ongoing, sometimes heated, conflict. In recent times "social" and "cultural" history have sometimes been presented as mutually exclusive. Once again, conceptual innovation in history has been cast as a closure in which the new drives out the old: in this case, cultural history radically displaces social history. But esteemed historians and theorists Geoff Eley and Keith Nield suggest ways to break through the logjam, by combining the post-structuralist critique of knowledge with certain registers of structuralist argument. "The Future of Class in History" analyses the conflict that followed historians' "cultural turn" by examining the use of class, and demonstrates how practitioners in multiple, sometimes conflicting fields can work collaboratively to produce the highest quality scholarship.
