E.P. Thompson

E.P. Thompson (born Feb. 3, 1924—died Aug. 28, 1993, Upper Wick, Worcester, Eng.) was a British social historian and political activist. His The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and other works heavily influenced post-World War II historiography. Thompson participated in the founding of the British New Left in the 1950s, and in the 1980s he became one of Europe’s most prominent antinuclear activists.

E.P. Thompson was born into a family of Methodist missionaries. During World War II he served in Africa and Italy as a tank troop leader. After the war, he completed his B.A. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1946), where he joined the British Communist Party. In the decade that followed, Thompson devoted himself to grassroots organizing and peace activism, taught evening classes at the University of Leeds, and conducted research on his first book, a biography of William Morris, the 19th-century socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement. In 1948 he married a fellow communist and historian, Dorothy Sale; their enduring intellectual partnership was a prominent feature of the postwar British left.

Thompson was outraged by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and he bitterly broke away from the British Communist Party. He remained a dedicated Marxist, however, and cofounded a new journal, The New Left Review, around which thousands of other disaffected leftists united in forming a noncommunist political movement, the New Left. This same dissident impulse informed Thompson’s historical thinking, particularly his most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class.

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In the passionately eloquent prose style that became his trademark, Thompson attacked the prevailing Marxist emphasis on impersonal economic forces as the key vectors of historical change and Marxism’s interpretation of 19th-century class consciousness as an automatic by-product of the new industrial factory system. Nothing was automatic about the rise of the working class, he argued: 19th-century workers had courageously forged their own collective identity through a difficult and precarious process in which the initiative, moral conviction, and imaginative efforts of individual activists had made a crucial difference. In a now-famous phrase, he described himself as seeking to rescue British workers “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” The Making of the English Working Class rapidly became one of the most influential historical works of the post-World War II era, provoking a sustained and widespread renewal of scholarly interest in the intricacies of grassroots history narrated “from below.” Equally important, the book helped to nurture the relatively new field of social history, marking the beginning of its ascendancy within the social sciences and humanities.

Despite his growing influence, Thompson maintained an ambivalent relationship with the academic world. He regarded himself as an academic outsider and critic of the established professoriat, and at the University of Warwick (Coventry, England), where he taught from 1965, he sided with student protesters who demanded reforms in the university. At the same time, he defended many of the underlying canons and standards of professional scholarship and produced a steady stream of influential historical essays alongside more polemical and satirical works. None was more notable than his 1971 article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” which focused on the transition from a paternalist model of economic relationships, in which moral notions of reciprocity across class lines still held sway, to a modern model based on the untrammeled logic of market forces. Thompson framed the term “moral economy” as a conceptual hybrid, arising out of the overlapping spheres of cultural norms, social practices, and economic institutions. The sophistication and flexibility of this construct accounted for its attractiveness to scholars in fields as diverse as anthropology and the history of science; ultimately it became the most widely cited historical essay of the postwar period.

In the early 1980s, concern over new missile deployments in Europe by NATO and the Warsaw Pact drove Thompson to set aside temporarily his historical research and plunge into antinuclear activism. He had been active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament since the late 1950s; he now traveled incessantly, giving speeches and publishing several books analyzing the Cold War and setting forth his vision of a Europe without superpowers. His rigorous evenhandedness in condemning both Cold War blocs gave him widespread credibility among many western Europeans, who came to look upon him as one of their most popular and trusted moral leaders. Much of this peace activism was carried out in close collaboration with his wife, Dorothy, who taught history at the University of Birmingham and published books on Chartism and on the role of women in radical English politics and the antinuclear movement.

Those familiar with Thompson’s historical writings recognized in his peace activism the same concern that had preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life: creating a space for grassroots human agency and for moral dissidence against the arrogance of the powerful. In both arenas Thompson sought to persuade his audiences that they placed too great an emphasis on faceless and monolithic socioeconomic forces acting upon human beings and paid too little attention to the possibilities opened up by individual personality, moral choice, and other expressions of human experience and initiative. Self-consciously aligning himself with a long tradition of British radical dissenters, starting with the Levelers and Ranters, and continuing through Thomas Paine and William Morris to the present day, Thompson sought to demonstrate that society’s downtrodden should not be seen, or see themselves, as helpless and passive objects of history. This lifelong stance of defiant dissent infused his posthumously published Witness Against the Beast (1993) a full-scale reassessment of the poet William Blake and the radical political and cultural movements of the Romantic era. Whatever form his vision of “the Beast” took—whether it was the Communist Party bureaucracy, the boardrooms of corporate capitalism, the “respectable” academic establishment, or the vast military and political structures of the Cold War—Thompson consistently voiced his own passionate and constructive opposition.

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