HAROLD PERKIN was a path-breaking and rigorous historian, a provocative, witty lecturer and an influential intellectual, who helped to promote the change in the climate of ideas that presaged the end of the New Right ascendancy of the 1980s and early 1990s.

He was born in a terrace cottage in Stoke-on-Trent where his father, who had left school at 13, was a builder. No doubt because of his background he had an unusual instinct for the subtle gradations of social class and the complex human meanings of social inequality. He had no patience with Marxist attempts to force these complexities into a simple, class-war mould. Nor did he have much time for sentimental Tories who mourned the disappearance of an allegedly organic society in which high and low all knew their place.

He was educated at Hanley High School for Boys, where he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read history. After National Service in the RAF he became a staff tutor in the extramural department at Manchester University, and later a university lecturer in history. His appointment as Professor of Social History at Lancaster University followed in 1967, when he was only 38. He was the first such professor in Britain. His reputation as a scholar and intellectual rests on a trilogy of books that, between them, transformed our understanding of the emergence and development of industrial society in the land of its birth, and threw a harsh new light on the global economy of our time. These were: The Origins of Modern English Society (1969), The Rise of Professional Society (1989) and The Third Revolution (1996). All three were infused with a rare blend of learning, analytical power, imagination and empathy.

The Origins of Modern English Society told the story of the struggle between the three “social ideals” of industrial revolution Britain: between the “aristocratic ideal” of the landed class; the “entrepreneurial ideal” of the owner-managers in the rising manufacturing middle class; and the “working-class ideal” of the small, but growing industrial proletariat.

Perkin held that the central theme of early-19th-century British history lay in the victory of the entrepreneurial ideal over the other two. But, as so often with him, there was a twist in the tail. By the middle of the 19th century, he argued, the victory of the entrepreneurial ideal was complete. But the seeds of its eventual downfall were sown in that very moment. The interests of the “forgotten middle class” in the developing professions were in tension with those of the capitalist owner-managers whose rise dominated the first half of the century; the victory of the entrepreneurial ideal allowed the professional middle class to break away from the capitalist one. It proceeded to do so, in the name of a new “professional ideal”, centred on the values of service and expertise and at odds with the principles of the marketplace. The Rise of Professional Society traced the growth of the professional ideal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and told the story of its victory and subsequent misadventures. By the mid-20th century, Perkin argued, the professional ideal had triumphed as completely as the entrepreneurial ideal had done a century before. But, just as the entrepreneurial ideal had started to decline in the moment of its triumph, the professional ideal started to lose its glitter when it achieved moral and cultural hegemony. Public service professionals were confronted by a backlash led by their private sector cousins. And, by a strange paradox, this private sector backlash took place under the banner of a new version of the entrepreneurial ideal of 150 years before.

The Third Revolution, a sombre comparative study of the role of professional elites in the major economies of the developed world, was the last and certainly most pessimistic of Perkin’s trio. Almost everywhere, he gave warning, professional elites were abandoning the service ethic of their forebears and feathering their nests at the expense of their fellow citizens, whom they treated as “dairy herds to be milked to exhaustion”. The great question was how to prevent them from abusing their power. But did we really want to prevent them? Or were we “content to let the false prophets of individual greed and unenlightened self-interest lead us down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire?” Yet Perkin was not, by nature, a sombre man. He was instinctively a yea-sayer, not a nay-sayer; a happy warrior, not a prophet of doom. Eternal bonfires were not his style. The contrast between his jovial warmth, zest for life and patently happy marriage on the one hand, and the grim message of The Third Revolution on the other, gave the latter added force.

His career was rich in achievement. He published ten books and numerous articles and held chairs at Lancaster University and Northwestern University in America. He had a visiting professorship at Rice University, founded and chaired the Social History Society, and served as chief salary negotiator for the Association of University Teachers and was later its president.

He is survived by his wife Joan and their son and daughter.

Professor Harold Perkin, social historian, was born on November 11, 1926. He died on October 16, 2004, aged 77.