By any measure, E.P. Thompson is a central figure in the development of social history
after World War II. He is most commonly understood as having played the crucial role in
the emergence of history from below, a way of looking at the past as centrally constructed
by the actions of ordinary working people as they responded to their times and
circumstances. This was an approach which, in Thompson's hands, became a means of
countering the dominant ways in which history and the social sciences had developed in
the post-war world. Thompson therefore sustained, through his life, a sharp critique of
'mechanical' ways of doing history that suggested that people were completely
determined and directed, 'from the outside', by impersonal economic forces. His most
celebrated work, the massive 1963 volume The Making of the English Working Class, has
often been referred to as the single most influential work of history in post-war Britain,
and it is difficult, too, to think of another work which has had comparable global
influence, in contexts as widely varied as India, Brazil and South Africa – to take just
three instances of history circles where this book acquired a readership and following.
Equally, Thompson is remembered for the passion of his political activism. Originally a
member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Thompson was one of the first to leave
in the wake of Khruschev's 1956 'secret speech' about the brutalities during the Stalin era
in the Soviet Union. He became a leading figure in Britain's first New Left, opposing a
vision of socialist democracy and humanism to the polarities forced upon people by the
Cold War.
Thompson's enthusiasm for the history of popular struggles and his own commitment to a
radical, socialist agenda are inseparable from each other, and a brief look at his life gives
us several examples of the ways in which this is true. His father, Edward Thompson
senior, was a liberal Methodist missionary who had worked in India and had become
close to anti-colonial Indian circles, cultivating a friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.
Thompson thus grew up in a household which was constantly full of anti-imperialists and
campaigners for Indian independence. While at school, he and his sixth-form class (in
1940) were introduced to the early work of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, on the
English Civil War. Thompson followed Hill's accounts of English popular radicalism to
their source in seventeenth-century pamphlets by the Levellers, and this seems to have
fostered a lifelong sense of a continuing English tradition of popular democracy and
anti-authoritarian politics. The influence of historians like Hill was decisive, and in time
Thompson would exert a corresponding influence on them: these are the ways in which
British post-war socialist historiography was created. However, personal and family
circumstances also pushed Thompson's concerns leftward. His brother Frank, who joined
the Communist Party and was killed by the fascists while fighting alongside Bulgarian
partisans in 1944, was an enormous inspiration. Thompson himself participated in the
war as a tank commander in Italy, and followed Frank into the Communist Party in 1942.
The anti-fascist cause, which among other things brought various shades of progressive
and left-leaning politics closer together, furnished for him a model of a united democratic
and socialist Europe that stayed close to his heart all his life.
After the war, Thompson completed his studies at Oxford, and took up a job in teaching
History and English at the extra-mural department of the University of Leeds at Halifax
in west Yorkshire. This was adult education for working-class men and women, and he
later attributed many of the themes and insights in his historical research to his encounter
with these students, dedicating The Making to them. While at Halifax, he would write
two enormous books, the first being a biography of William Morris, and the second being
The Making.
These books were also shaped by the membership of Thompson – and of his wife,
Dorothy, who would also go on to become a major historian of the working classes – in
the Communist Party Historians' Group, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s
provided a home for several people who would become the most influential and creative
British historians of their generation: Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton,
and Raphael Samuel, besides the Thompsons. Each of these historians played a part in
building the new 'history from below', written from the perspective of marginalized,
subordinated, and resistant groups of people, in opposition to the dominant forms of
history of the day. 1956 was a decisive year: Khruschev's revelations about Stalin's reign
of terror forced many Communists, including the members of the Historians' Group, to
reconsider their attachment to Stalinist Communism. More than the other historians who
left the Party, Thompson broke with Stalinism in order to embrace a socialist politics that
refused the option of either East or West, and set itself up in opposition to the choices
offered by the Cold War. This New Left impulse would have several incarnations
between the 1950s and the 1980s. Two instances of Thompson's political involvements
may be in order here. First, between 1965 and 1972, Thompson was employed here, at
the University of Warwick, at the Centre for Social History (which no longer exists). In
1970, he threw in his lot with students who were moved to radical action – such as the
occupation of Senate House – by their discovery of files which showed university
authorities, in conjunction with prominent industrialists, spying on students and teachers
viewed as political dissidents. Thompson immediately edited and published a book
named Warwick University Limited, about the authoritarian ways in which university
education was being transformed. Thompson was, however, soon to leave the academic
system, in order to concentrate on research. In the 1980s, his research was interrupted by
another, and much more global, political involvement – the struggle for European nuclear
disarmament and against the arms race. Thompson became one of the founders, and most
prominent voices, of the organization END (European Nuclear Disarmament). Along
with thousands of others, he saw nuclear conflict as almost inevitable if ordinary people
did not unite in opposing it. At one level this was a revival of his old dream of a united
socialist Europe; at another, however, it betokened a much darker and more tragic
political vision, where saving the world from destruction by a Cold War turned hot –
rather than the socialist transformation of this world – became the central priority. And
the peace movement Thompson helped build certainly played a role in forestalling the
possibility of nuclear holocaust.
I could go on about Thompson's life and politics at length, but it's time to turn to his
academic work, his contributions to the development of history-writing, and the
implications this has for historiography. What I want to do now is turn to some concrete
instances of Thompson's method and style of historical argumentation, and on this basis
describe the nature of his contribution.
Consider the argument about class from The Making of the English Working Class. It is
an argument that, over 900 pages, works on two levels which are joined in all sorts of
ways – through the use of colourful examples, through polemical broadsides against
orthodox histories, and so on. One of these two levels is that of an argument about class
itself, as a historical relationship rather than a static category. (QUOTE 1). There, in the
very opening lines of the book, you have it, stated with great force: the working class was
'present at its own making', in the sense that the historical processes of industrial
capitalism were not simply imposed upon labouring people as though they were a blank
slate to be written on. These people had already been formed by prior experiences and
traditions, and they responded to the 'structural' changes of their time through the prism
of these traditions. This leads on to a significantly new conception of social class, not as a
'structure' or a 'category', but as lived human experience, and an active historical
relationship which is always embodied in real people, and is not some sort of abstraction
working above and through them.
What is Thompson arguing against, in these wonderfully polemical lines? Another quote
might help here, again from the Preface to The Making – surely one of the most quoted
texts in academic history! (QUOTE 2). Look at the orthodoxies he spells out: within a
single passage, he summarizes three very distinct kinds of arguments, shared by
historians across political and ideological divides – all of which he feels the need to take
issue with, in order to stake out this 'active' conception of class as a historical
relationship. (Fabians; Marxists; sociologists; orthodox economic historians). Note also
that striking phrase: 'the enormous condescension of posterity'. Clearly, the different
historical schools he is arguing against, in his eyes, commit the offence of patronizing
and condescending to their subjects, against which Thompson sets out what we might see
as an argument for historical empathy.
So what is the conception of class that Thompson himself works out through this book?
Here we come, necessarily, to the second of the levels I mentioned – the concrete
working out of the English working-class experience, in the light of its specific contexts.
Here is another quote to help illuminate this. (QUOTE 3). These lines are from the end
of Chapter 1, in which Thompson provides a lively and engrossing narrative of a
working-class organization to campaign for political rights, the London Corresponding
Society. Through this brief narrative at the outset, Thompson establishes an existing
tradition of popular dissenting politics, concentrated among artisans and craftsmen. This
sort of class consciousness, he thus demonstrates, was already at work, well before the
onset of full-scale industrialization. So the idea that the working-class experience was
simply a 'product' of industrial capitalism must be jettisoned – what must be studied,
instead, are the ways in which this historical experience was handled, in cultural and
political terms, by those who were its subjects. We come to a conclusion that had eluded
earlier generations of historians – that it was the experience of groups that, in the long
run, disappeared under the onslaught of capitalism (independent artisans and craftsmen)
which decisively shaped the democratic and radical political ideologies and idioms
through which the working class constructed itself in the nineteenth century. (In a later
essay, Thompson would go on to elaborate the notion of eighteenth-century English
society as characterized by 'class struggle without class' – in the sense that the “classes”
which contended for social power were in the process of being formed, and the struggles
themselves were precisely about class, rather than between classes.) These elements – of
radical religious Dissent, of popular democratic belief and practice – were reshaped,
Thompson argues throughout the book, in the context of the French Revolution and the
impact it had upon Britain. This impact was, in the first place, felt through severe
political repression; second, it isolated different groups of labouring people as the
crucible of democratic and radical politics. Here Thompson also breaks with the
orthodoxy that presents the political reform of 1832 chiefly as the achievement of the
middle classes : through the early nineteenth century, he suggests, it was the working
class that played the leading role in seeking and fighting for radical change.
Thompson does go on, after about 200 pages, to discuss the human consequences of
industrial capitalist transformation. Here is his verdict. (QUOTE 4). This is from the
chapter on “Exploitation”, another of your seminar readings. This is a significantly
different way of handling economic arguments from the prevailing orthodoxies at the
time Thompson wrote. He seeks to qualify and question the concern of the leading
schools of English economic history-writing with statistical proofs and rebuttals. This
apparently simple passage discloses something central to Thompson's conception of the
relationship between 'objective' economic processes and human experience: this
relationship, he argues, is never direct. It is possible for things to get better and get worse
at the same time: in history, the two frequently go hand-in-hand. What matters above all
is not the quantifiable 'result' of economic change, but rather the complex ways in which
the people affected by them handle their experience.
Thompson's concluding reflections on working-class experiences and consciousness, in
the last chapter of The Making, are worth looking at. (QUOTE 5). They convey, in a
concentrated form, so many of the complexities involved in the formation of the English
working class. There is the diversity of working skills that lay at the base of industrial
transformation itself. There is the fact that so much of radical working class
consciousness was produced precisely by the desire to avoid proletarianization, to avoid
being stripped of all assets except one's labour. There is the way that class consciousness,
of this and other sorts, seeps silently and slowly into all the institutions of everyday life.
There is, finally, the intriguing suggestion that the great missed opportunity for radical
politics in the age of industrialization was a 'junction' between working-class radicalism
and Romantic ideology, two strains that ran close together but only very rarely met.
You'll notice that Thompson makes a reference to the poet and engraver William Blake in
this passage. It is worth remarking here that towards the end of his life Thompson, who
was always of a very literary bent, wrote an extraordinary, moving study of Blake and his
times, entitled Witness Against the Beast. Here, oddly enough, many of the themes in The
Making are reprised: in particular, the long persistence of forms of radical religious
Dissent. Except that here these questions are worked out through a concentrated focus not
on a class, but on one very unique individual and his experience, whose writings and art
stand testimony to the richness of dissenting ideology.
All right, so that's Thompson's argument about English working-class experience, and the
ways to approach class as a historian, in The Making. I now want to turn, much more
briefly, to some of the themes that Thompson tackled in subsequent work. In the 1970s,
as I mentioned, he left Warwick University to carry out research as an independent
scholar. While involvement in the peace movement abbreviated Thompson's career as a
practising historian considerably (he died in 1993), the 1970s did see the emergence of
significantly new concerns and themes. For one thing, Thompson found himself moving
further back into the eighteenth century, impelled by his interest in writing as deep a
history of popular, plebeian experience in modern England as possible. One of the new
themes concerned a study of the role of law and its role in the social relations of the
eighteenth century. This led to a book, Whigs and Hunters, published in 1975, which was
remarkably different in its style from The Making, being concentrated and focused where
The Making often seemed to be sprawling and huge, almost like a big novel. In Whigs
and Hunters, and in several other writings of this period, Thompson carried out the study
of law on two distinct but converging lines. First, he showed the ways in which laws –
especially property law and the law of capital punishment – were used to ruthlessly
enforce the authority of England's ruling classes, and repress the customary practices and
traditions of the poor. At the same time, however, Thompson rejected the traditional
Marxist notion that law was somehow part of a 'superstructure' that rested upon an
'economic' base of relations of production. This chimed well with his concerns in the
1970s – through the decade, he was concerned to show the ways in which the base-andsuperstructure model adopted for the study of society by so many Marxists was simply
misleading on a number of levels. Specifically about law, he made the argument that one
found it everywhere, in his own words, 'at every bloody level', not just at the level of the
superstructure. Law could be found running through people's customs, through
agricultural practice, through social relations. And consequently, Thompson also rejected
a shibboleth of a large section of the radical left – the idea that law, in and of itself, was
always simply an instrument of ruling power. Pointing to the various ways in which the
poor needed the law for their own survival, the ways in which they fought over law as
much as they did against it, Thompson argued that some version of the rule of law was
unavoidable in complex human societies, and it could be a valuable weapon of popular
struggle.
Finally, in the 1970s Thompson intensively researched the customary practices of the
labouring agricultural and artisanal poor in the eighteenth century, in a society that was
still largely agrarian but beginning to experience economic transformation and the spread
of new kinds of markets and economic practices. One of his early forays into these
themes was in the essay 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Century”, which was re-published in the posthumous collection of essays, Customs in
Common, in 1994. Here's a quotation from that essay, which sums up Thompson's
purpose in conducting a study of crowd behaviour. (QUOTE 6).
What Thompson was demanding and trying to supply, in a sense, was a different kind of
economic history, one which saw the processes of economic transformation as being
contested, not only in a self-consciously political way, but through the warp and woof of
people's everyday lives, practices, and customs and collective rituals. The food riot in the
eighteenth century, he tried to show, was not simply a 'reaction' to hunger; it was,
equally, the expression of a moral economy at work, based on notions of just prices,
violent opposition to hoarding and speculation, and a web of related principles that made
up a sort of economic consensus about legitimate practice. (QUOTE 7). Here's a final
quotation to make the stakes of the argument clear. In this passage Thompson lists the
apparently simple practices surrounding the production and marketing of bread; at each
point along the line, however, potential flashpoints of social conflict emerge, especially
in the charged atmosphere of economic change in the late eighteenth century.
Thompson's other great theme, in his study of custom – also hinted at in this passage – is
the way in which the moral economy of the poor drew heavily upon a 'paternalist' model
of grain provision and regulated markets that was contained in Statute law and the
practices of many magistrates. As the economic basis for this sort of moral economy
eroded, Thompson argues, these elements of 'paternalist' protection became a source of
claims made by the poor in terms of 'custom' and common rights.
This is not all: there are several other themes in Thompson's work that merit a long
discussion. But since we don't have much time left, I'd like to conclude with a couple of
observations about the influence of Thompson's work and the arguments it has provoked.
By any measure, the works I've talked about, as well as others I haven't, compose a
hugely important body of historical work and reflection. Thompson is undoubtedly the
central figure – though far from the only one – to have helped shift history-writing in
Britain, and elsewhere, away from its erstwhile preoccupations with high politics,
economic generalization and statistical quantification. Two concepts which are pretty
much unavoidable in serious historical argument, and have been so for the last few
decades, are experience and agency. Thompson, at various points in his life, suggested
variations on these terms as the elementary components of a proper historical practice.
Neither of these was meant to be a 'static', non-historical 'category' with a clear definition
and clear rules for application. Rather, the point being made was poetic as much as it was
analytical: Thompson's point was that history needed to continually be sensitive to the
changing character of social experience that posed new questions to people, and to the
changing nature of the answers that people created. Agency was fundamental to this
process: the historian needed, according to Thompson, a continual openness to the ways
in which large historical processes were never simply 'decided' once and for all, but rather
were the subject of ongoing, creative struggles by ordinary people to change their course
or appropriate their meanings. Now there's no question that a great deal of this
understanding has come to permeate the consciousness of historians themselves, across
the world and in different sub-disciplines. The Subaltern Studies group of historians in
India, of whom you shall be hearing more of in a later lecture, made analogous arguments
about the role of peasants in colonial Indian society, and the ways in which they
interpreted and appropriated both state policy and nationalist agitation. That's just one
cursory example. Another and perhaps more wide-ranging example is the global spread
of labour history after Thompson's publication of The Making. Labour history, as a subdiscipline, was in many ways liberated from a whole host of older methodologies and
preoccupations by Thompson's intervention. The two decades or so after The Making saw
an incredible efflorescence of ways of writing working-class history in Britain, France,
and the United States. That moment in historical studies in the West seems to have ebbed,
but there are other parts of the world – India, parts of Latin America, and South Africa –
where labour history, often extremely aware of and receptive to Thompsonian concerns,
is a growing academic field.
And finally, there have been critiques galore, some of them polemical and hasty, some of
them serious and thought-provoking. Orthodox Marxists have argued against Thompson's
use of class in such an open-ended, non-structural fashion: what happens, they ask, to the
actual operation of much more rigid structures of class rule, patterns of more complete
domination by newly emerging ruling classes, and economic forces that working people
had no way really of shaping effectively? Other historians, such as Carolyn Steedman,
have pointed out that while Thompson's own analysis calls for the study of class as a
relationship between two forces, he really only considers the working-class side of the
relationship: the ruling classes are prone to appear, often enough, as the personifications
of certain ideas and principles, rather than also as a class-in-the-making. Then there is an
important tradition of feminist critique. Feminist social history, as practised by historians
like Anna Clark, Catherine Hall, Carolyn Steedman and others, has in many ways drawn
heavily upon Thompson's open, fluid, non-deterministic conceptions of social class and
historical process. But, at the same time, it has been impossible to ignore the very male
character of a great deal of the evidence Thompson draws on, and the picture of a largely
masculine working class forming itself through typically male occupations. Similar
points have been made with regard to race and empire. And finally, post-structuralist
approaches to history have stressed the shaping role of language and discourse in class
and other forms of consciousness, and suggested that Thompson should have been more
attentive to the role of working-class discourses in shaping the experience of class
formation.
All this criticism, some of which Thompson responded to in his lifetime and some of
which he couldn't have anticipated, has had profound effects upon the study of class,
experience, agency, and other terms and histories addressed in his work. I don't have time
to look at these effects now, so I'll just end with a brief comment on these critiques. There
is a certain ambiguity in much of this criticism: does it call for an extension of
Thompson's concerns, or does it to some extent invalidate and change those concerns
themselves? Is the call for a more gender-sensitive perspective on class, for instance, a
challenge to Thompson's very method of doing history, or is it a call for a more complete
application of that method to areas of experience he gave short shrift? Similar points
could be made about other points of critique: the point is that the debate on Thompson's
legacy continues, in various parts of the world, without any overarching consensus. In
this sense, Thompson remains a living historian.