The second disillusionment was political. Before 1970 much of the historical profession in Europe had belonged to the militant left, often communist, and had paid at least lip service to one or another variety of “scientific” Marxism. But, as Giovanni Levi has written, after 1970 there began “years of crisis for the prevailing optimistic belief that the world would be rapidly and radically transformed along revolutionary lines.”11 Socialist regimes fought each other, while the triumph of communism in Southeast Asia led to genocide in Cambodia. The nascent environmental movement radically challenged the Left's confidence in technological progress. Thanks to the burgeoning feminist movement, women's liberation came to seem a more pressing and feasible matter than the triumph of the proletariat. In this changed atmosphere, a Marxist ideology rigidly focused on a reified “working class,” and on the inevitable working out of vast historical forces, seemed increasingly irrelevant. Far more attractive was a Thompsonian vision of “history from below” in which the common people, rather than acting in lockstep obedience to historical “laws” and the dictates of “vanguard” parties, acted to shape their own identities and destinies.