From the left, Wehler has been criticized by two British Marxist historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley. Their 1980 book "Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung" (translated into English in 1984 as "The Peculiarities of German History") rejected the entire concept of the "Sonderweg" as a flawed construct supported by "a curious mixture of idealistic analysis and vulgar materialism", which led to an "exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s". In Blackbourn and Eley's view, there was no "Sonderweg", and it is ahistorical to ask why Germany did not become Britain for the simple reasons that Germany is Germany and Britain is Britain. Moreover, Eley and Blackbourn argued that after 1890, there was a tendency towards greater democratization in German society with the growth of civil society, as reflected in the growth of trade unions and a more-or-less free press.