The experience of socialist countries, which Geoff Eley and Keith Nielddo not address, raises fundamental questions about their argument. Class-basedthinking and rhetoric under Soviet socialism served as a weapon in the hands ofthe authorities, not as a vehicle for critical analysis, let alone for humanemancipation. Before 1917, class-based ways of looking at the world presentedenormous, indeed insurmountable obstacles for a liberal-based politics. Eley andNield, while embracing liberalism, want to retain a role for class, but theirvague proposals are almost exclusively rooted in historiographical polemics ofoverblown significance.