A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ d… - Eric Hobsbawm

It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class ideology, though there were many enlighteners—and politically they were the decisive ones—who assumed as a matter of course that the free society would be a capitalist society. In theory its object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out of it. Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a ‘bourgeois’ and capitalist one.

Let me put it in paradoxical form. It is equally unhelpful to dismiss Marx because we dislike his demonstration that capitalism and bourgeois society are temporary historical phenomena, and to embrace him simply because we are for socialism, which he thought would succeed them. I believe Marx discerned some basic tendencies with profound insight; but we do not know actually what they will bring. Like so much of the future predicted in the past, when it comes it may be unrecognizable, not because the predictions were wrong but because we were wrong to put a particular face and costume to the interesting stranger whose arrival we were told to expect.

The internal and external pressures to do so may be great. Our passions and interests may urge us in this direction. Every Jew, for instance, whatever his or her occupation, instinctively accepts the force of the question with which, during many threatening centuries, members of our minority community confronted any and every event in the wider world: Is it good for the Jews? Is it bad for the Jews?' In times of discrimination or persecution it provided guidance - though not necessarily the best guidance - for private and public behaviour, a strategy at all levels for a scattered people. Yet it cannot and should not guide a Jewish historian, even one who writes the history of his own people. Historians, however microcosmic, must be for universalism, not out of loyalty to an ideal to which many of us remain attached but because it is the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity. For all human collectivities necessarily are and have been part of a larger and more complex world. A history which is designed only for Jews (or African-Americans, or Greeks, or women, or proletarians, or homosexuals) cannot be good history, though it may be comforting history to those who practise it.