The label of ‘translator’, put forward by Appleby to describe the entire discipline of history could not be applied to social historians, many of whom took the train ‘through the terrain of textuality to the land of discourse and deconstruction’ but who were not sure whether they would stay ‘very long at the destination’, in Geoff Eley’s opinion in 1990.1 At the apogee of their sub-discipline in the 1970s, the majority of them had been influenced by Marxian analyses of social and collective actions and material and other causes, frequently in contrast to supposedly mistaken or dissembling avowals of individual motives. A significant number had sought to describe and explain Charles Tilly’s ‘big structures, large processes [and] huge comparisons’.2