"In an epoch-making study entitled English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime, published in 1985, he forcefully argued that eighteenth-century England, its policy based on a close alliance between the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, was an "ancien regime", indistinguishable from contemporary France, for instance, or even Spain. What it was not was some sort of forward-looking experiment in constitutional monarchy and representative government. Thus the final collapse of this ancien regime was heralded not by the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 but by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1830 [sic], when England ceased to be a confessional state. In the same way he argued for the close identification of political radicalism with religious nonconformity, in contradiction to E. P. Thompson's Tawneyesque The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 and well established as a classic. Clark's theories have provoked a great deal of opposition, not eased by his confrontational technique and acerbity of manner, but he has to be taken seriously, and it must be rare indeed for a scholar of his age (born in 1951) to have two major historical conferences and two issues of different professional journals entirely devoted to a discussion of his theories. We must never forget that his work runs in parallel with the excellent but more conventional work of John Cannon, Ian Christie, Paul Langford and others, but there is no doubt that he has put a new spin on British eighteenth-century studies, and it is safe to say that they will never be the same again."