Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspectiveà la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much strongeremphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson.Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing thedynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied localcontexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feedthese movements and alliances. Class is thus reduced to a microheuristic ofhidden injuries and subaltern identities. However, the concept of social classcan only help to articulate a position beyond formal institutionalism and theclass language of bipolarity when it is wedded to a nonreductionist,nonessentialist, and nonfinalist theory of capitalism. Seen from thisperspective, capitalism is a worldwide and world- embedded process of combinedand uneven development that constantly assembles and disassembles the materialsfrom which human communities are made. In short, if we want to rethink class inplace, we need to rethink capitalism in space.