Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular ''
The Making of the English Working Class
''The Making of the English Working Class'' is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and republished in revised form in 1968 by Pelican, after ...
'' (1963).
In 1966, Thompson coined the term "history from below" to describe his approach to
social history
Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.
Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
, which became one of the most consequential developments within the global history discipline. History from below arose from the
Communist Party Historians Group
The Communist Party Historians' Group (CPHG) was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that formed a highly influential cluster of United Kingdom, British Marxist historiography, Marxist historians. The Historians' Group de ...
and its work to popularise
historical materialism
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of Class society, class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
Karl Marx stated that Productive forces, techno ...
.
Thompson's work is considered by some to have been among the most important contributions to
social history
Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.
Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa. In a 2011 poll by ''
History Today
''History Today'' is a history magazine. Published monthly in London since January 1951, it presents authoritative history to as wide a public as possible. The magazine covers all periods and geographical regions and publishes articles of tradit ...
'' magazine, he was named the second most important historian of the previous 60 years, behind only
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Paul Achille Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' (1955–79), and the un ...
.
Early life
E. P. Thompson was born in
Oxford
Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town.
The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...
to
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a Protestant Christianity, Christian Christian tradition, tradition whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's brother ...
missionary parents: His father,
Edward John Thompson (1886–1946), was a poet and admirer of the Nobel Prize–winning poet
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Thakur (; anglicised as Rabindranath Tagore ; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengalis, Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengal Renai ...
. His older brother was
William Frank Thompson
Major William Frank Thompson (17 August 1920 – 10 June 1944) was a British officer who acted as a liaison between the British Army and the Bulgarian communist partisans during the Second World War.
Early life, family and education
Thompson ...
(1920–1944), a British officer in the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans.
Edward Thompson and his mother wrote ''There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson'' (1947). This out of print memoir was re-released by Brittunculi Records & Books in 2024. Thompson would later write another book about his brother, published posthumously in 1996.
Thompson attended two private schools,
The Dragon School in Oxford and
Kingswood School in
Bath
Bath may refer to:
* Bathing, immersion in a fluid
** Bathtub, a large open container for water, in which a person may wash their body
** Public bathing, a public place where people bathe
* Thermae, ancient Roman public bathing facilities
Plac ...
. Like many he left school in 1941 to fight in the Second World War. He served in a tank unit in the
Italian campaign, including at the fourth battle of
Cassino
Cassino () is a ''comune'' in the province of Frosinone at the southern end of the region of Lazio. It's the last city of the Valle Latina, Latin Valley.
It is located at the foot of Monte Cairo near the confluence of the Gari (river), Gari and ...
.
After his military service, he studied at
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College (full name: "The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary", often shortened to "Corpus") is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. From the late 14th c ...
, where he joined the
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB ...
. In 1946, Thompson formed the
Communist Party Historians Group
The Communist Party Historians' Group (CPHG) was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that formed a highly influential cluster of United Kingdom, British Marxist historiography, Marxist historians. The Historians' Group de ...
with
Christopher Hill,
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (''Th ...
,
Rodney Hilton,
Dona Torr, and others. In 1952 they launched the journal ''
Past and Present''.
Scholarship
1950s: ''William Morris''
Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of
William Morris
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditiona ...
, written while he was a member of the Communist Party. Subtitled ''From Romantic to Revolutionary'', it was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group, inspired by Torr, to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. It was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who for more than 50 years had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics.
Although Morris's political work is well to the fore, Thompson also used his literary talents to comment on aspects of Morris's work, such as his early Romantic poetry, which had previously received relatively little consideration. As Thompson noted in his preface to the second edition (1976), the first edition (1955) appears to have received relatively little attention from the literary establishment because of its then-unfashionable Marxist point of view. However, the somewhat rewritten second edition was much better received.
After
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Chai ...
's
"secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...
in 1956, which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with
John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called ''The Reasoner''. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of
Hungary
Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...
.
But Thompson remained what he called a "socialist humanist". With Saville and others, he set up the ''
New Reasoner'', a journal that sought to develop a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors considered the ossified official
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...
of the Communist and
Trotskyist
Trotskyism (, ) is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an ...
parties and the managerialist cold war social democracy of the
Labour Party and its international allies. The ''New Reasoner'' was the most important organ of what became known as the "
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...
", an informal movement of dissident leftists closely associated with the nascent movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The ''New Reasoner'' combined with the ''
Universities and Left Review'' to form ''
New Left Review
The ''New Left Review'' is a British bimonthly journal, established in 1960, which analyses international politics, the global economy, social theory, and cultural topics from a leftist perspective.
History Background
As part of the emergin ...
'' in 1960, though Thompson and others fell out with the group around
Perry Anderson
Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson (born 11 September 1938) is a British intellectual, political philosopher, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites An ...
who took over the journal in 1962. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson ''et al.'' New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson ''et al.'' group, which by 1968 had embraced
Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali (;; born 21 October 1943) is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the ''New Left Review'' and ''Sin Permiso'', and co ...
and various Trotskyists, as the second.
Early-1960s: ''The Making of the English Working Class''
Thompson's most influential work was and remains ''
The Making of the English Working Class
''The Making of the English Working Class'' is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and republished in revised form in 1968 by Pelican, after ...
'', published in 1963 while he was working at the
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...
. The massive book, over 800 pages, was a watershed in the foundation of the field of
social history
Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.
Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
. By exploring the ordinary cultures of working people through their previously ignored documentary remains, Thompson told the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Reflecting on the importance of the book for its 50th anniversary, Emma Griffin explained that Thompson "uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards. He took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side. Here, then, was a book that rambled over aspects of human experience that had never before had their historian.
''The Making of the English Working Class'' had a profound effect on the shape of British historiography, and still endures as a staple on university reading lists more than 50 years after its first publication in 1963. Writing for the
Times Higher Education
''Times Higher Education'' (''THE''), formerly ''The Times Higher Education Supplement'' (''The THES''), is a British magazine reporting specifically on news and issues related to higher education.
Ownership
TPG Capital acquired TSL Education ...
in 2013,
Robert Colls recalled the power of Thompson's book for his generation of young British leftists:
I bought my first copy in 1968 – a small, fat bundle of Pelican
Pelicans (genus ''Pelecanus'') are a genus of large water birds that make up the family Pelecanidae. They are characterized by a long beak and a large throat pouch used for catching prey and draining water from the scooped-up contents before ...
with a picture of a Yorkshire miner on the front – and I still have it, bandaged up and exhausted by the years of labour. From the first of its 900-odd pages, I knew, and my friends at the University of Sussex knew, that this was something else. We talked about it in the bar and on the bus and in the refectory queue. Imagine that: young male students more interested in a book than in gooseberry tart and custard.
In his preface to this book, E.P. Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below, "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the
Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of
Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties."
Thompson's thought was also original and significant because of the way he defined "class." To Thompson, class was not a structure, but a relationship:
By re-defining class as a relationship that changed over time, Thompson proceeded to demonstrate how class was worthy of historical investigation. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as
David Montgomery and
Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.
A major work of research and synthesis, the book was also important in
historiographical
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline. By extension, the term ":wikt:historiography, historiography" is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiog ...
terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of a historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. Thompson wrote the book while living in Siddal,
Halifax, West Yorkshire
Halifax is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, in West Yorkshire, England. It is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. In the 15th century, the town became an economic hub of the old West Riding of Yorkshire, primarily in woo ...
and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax population.
In later essays, Thompson has emphasized that crime and disorder were characteristic responses of the working and lower classes to the oppressions imposed upon them. He argues that crime was defined and punished primarily as an activity that threatened the status, property and interests of the elites. England's lower classes were kept under control by large-scale execution, transportation to the colonies, and imprisonment in horrible hulks of old warships. There was no interest in reforming the culprits, the goal being to deter through extremely harsh punishment.
Late-1960s: ''Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism''
Time discipline, as it pertains to sociology and
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
, is the general name given to
social
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives fro ...
and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the
social currency
Social currency refers to the actual and potential resources from presence in social networks and communities, including both digital and offline. It is, in essence, an action made by a company or stance of being, to which consumers feel a sen ...
and awareness of time measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
Thompson authored ''Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism'', published in 1967, which posits that reliance on clock-time is a result of the European
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a transitional period of the global economy toward more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes, succee ...
and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of synchronic forms of time and work discipline. An accurate and precise record of time was not kept prior to the industrial revolution. The new clock-time imposed by government and capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions of time—such as natural rhythms of time like sunrise, sunset, and seasonal changes—that Thompson believed flowed from the collective wisdom of human societies. However, although it is likely that earlier views of time were imposed by religious and other social authorities prior to the industrial revolution, Thompson's work identified time discipline as an important concept for study within the
social science
Social science (often rendered in the plural as the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the ...
s.
Thompson addresses the development of time as a
measurement
Measurement is the quantification of attributes of an object or event, which can be used to compare with other objects or events.
In other words, measurement is a process of determining how large or small a physical quantity is as compared to ...
that has value and that can be controlled by
social structure
In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally rel ...
s. As labor became more mechanized during the industrial revolution, time became more precise and standardized. Factory work changed the relationship that the capitalist and laborers had with time and the
clock
A clock or chronometer is a device that measures and displays time. The clock is one of the oldest Invention, human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month, a ...
; clock time became a tool for
social control
Social control is the regulations, sanctions, mechanisms, and systems that restrict the behaviour of individuals in accordance with social norms and orders. Through both informal and formal means, individuals and groups exercise social con ...
. Capitalist interests demanded that the work of laborers be monitored accurately to ensure that cost of labor was to the maximum benefit of the capitalist.
Post-academia
Thompson left the
University of Warwick
The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...
in protest at its commercialisation, as documented in the book ''Warwick University Limited'' (1971). He continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States. However, he increasingly worked as a freelance writer, contributing many essays to ''
New Society
''New Society'' was a weekly magazine of social inquiry and social and cultural comment, published in the United Kingdom from 1962 to 1988. It drew on the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, social history and s ...
'', ''Socialist Register'' and historical journals. In 1978, he published ''The Poverty of Theory'' which attacked the
structural Marxism
Structural Marxism (sometimes called Althusserian Marxism) is an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France ...
of
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Althusser was a long-time member an ...
and his followers in Britain on ''New Left Review'' (saying: "...all of them are , unhistorical shit"). The title echoes that of
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
's 1847 polemic against
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, ; ; 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to ca ...
, ''
The Poverty of Philosophy
''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (French: ''Misère de la philosophie'') is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French language, French as a critique ...
''; and that of philosopher
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...
's 1936 book ''
The Poverty of Historicism''. Thompson's polemic provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson entitled ''Arguments Within English Marxism''.
During the late 1970s, Thompson acquired a large public audience as a critic of what he perceived as the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties; his writings from this time are collected in ''Writing By Candlelight'' (1980). From 1981 onward, Thompson was a frequent contributor to the American magazine ''
The Nation
''The Nation'' is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper ...
''.
From 1980, Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for
nuclear disarmament
Nuclear disarmament is the act of reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons. Its end state can also be a nuclear-weapons-free world, in which nuclear weapons are completely eliminated. The term ''denuclearization'' is also used to describe the pro ...
, revered by activists throughout the world. In Britain, his pamphlet ''Protest and Survive'', a parody on the government leaflet ''
Protect and Survive'', played a major role in the revived strength of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Just as important, Thompson was, with
Ken Coates,
Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 ''Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament'', calling for a
nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of
European Nuclear Disarmament. END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences (the END Conventions), and a small British pressure group.

Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at many public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing committee work. He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.
He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books ''Zero Option'' (1982) and ''The Heavy Dancers'' (1985). He also wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, ''Double Exposure'' (1985) and edited a collection of essays opposing
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...
's
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic nuclear missiles. The program was announced in 1983, by President Ronald Reagan. Reagan called for a ...
, ''Star Wars'' (1985).
An excerpt from a speech given by Thompson featured in the computer game
Deus Ex Machina
''Deus ex machina'' ( ; ; plural: ''dei ex machina''; 'God from the machine') is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is general ...
(1984). Thompson's own haunting recitation of his 1950 poem of "apocalyptic expectation, "The Place Called Choice," appeared on the 1984 vinyl recording "The Apocalypso", by Canadian pop group
Singing Fools, released by A&M Records. During the 1980s Thompson was also invited by
Michael Eavis, who founded a local branch of CND, to speak at the
Glastonbury Festival
The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts (commonly referred to as simply Glastonbury Festival, known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts held near Pilton, Somerset, England, in most su ...
on several occasions after it became a fundraising event for the organisation: Thompson's speech at the 1983 edition of the festival, where he declared that the audience were part of an "alternative nation" of " inventors, writers... theatre, musicians" opposed to
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
and the tradition of "moneymakers and imperialists" which he identified her with, was named by Eavis as the best speech ever made at the festival.
1990s: ''William Blake''
The last book Thompson finished was ''
Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law'' (1993). The product of years of research and published shortly after his death, it shows how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.
Legacy and criticism
Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB ...
. Although he left the party in 1956 due to its suppression of open debate over the
Soviet invasion of Hungary, he continued to refer to himself as a "historian in the
Marxist
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
tradition", calling for a rebellion against
Stalinism
Stalinism (, ) is the Totalitarianism, totalitarian means of governing and Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), 1927 to 1953 by dictator Jose ...
as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives".
Thompson played a key role in the first
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...
in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
Although Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain, he remained committed to Marxist ideals.
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski (; ; 23 October 1927 – 17 July 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analysis of Marxism, Marxist thought, as in his three-volume history of Marxist philosophy ''Main Current ...
wrote a very harsh criticism of Thompson in his 1974 essay "My Correct Views on Everything", accusing Thompson of intellectual dishonesty in minimizing the brutalities of communism and placing abstract principles over real-world consequences.
Tony Judt considered this rejoinder so authoritative that he claimed that "no one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again". Kołakowski's portrait of Thompson elicited some protests from readers and other left-wing journals came to Thompson's defence. On the 50th anniversary of the landmark publication of ''The Making of the English Working Class'', several journalists celebrated E.P. Thompson as one of the pre-eminent historians of his day.
As Marxist history became less fashionable in the face of the adaptation of discourse-focused approaches inspired by the
linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.
...
and
post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of Power (social and poli ...
in the 1980s, Thompson's work was subjected to critique by fellow historians.
Joan Wallach Scott argued that Thompson's approach in ''The Making of the English Working Class'' was
androcentric, and ignored the centrality of gender in the construction of class identities, with the sphere of paid labour in which economic class was rooted being understood as inherently male and privileged over the feminised domestic realm.
Sheila Rowbotham, also a feminist historian and a friend of E.P. and Dorothy Thompson, has argued that Scott's critique was ahistorical, given that the book was published in 1963, before the
second-wave feminist movement had fully developed a theoretical
gender perspective.
In a 2020 interview, Rowbotham acknowledged that "there was not a great deal of reference to women in ''The Making''... But at the time it seemed like there were a lot of references to women, because we had to read people like
J. H. Plumb — history in which there were really absolutely no women at all", and suggested that Thompson limited his writing about women in deference to his wife, for whom women's history was a key area of research interest. Rowbotham did acknowledge that whilst they supported the emancipation of women, the Thompsons had mixed feelings about the contemporary second-wave feminist movement, regarding it as too middle class.
Barbara Winslow, who studied under Thompson and named him as "the most important academic influence on my life", similarly acknowledged that whilst "he was not politically sympathetic to the women's liberation movement, in part because he thought it was an American import, he was not hostile to women students or their feminist research agendas", and argued that early women's history in the 1960s primarily focused on "writing women into history", with more sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches only arriving later.
Gareth Stedman Jones
Gareth Stedman Jones (born 17 December 1942) is an English academic and historian. As Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, he deals particularly with working-class history and Marxism.
Career
Educated at St ...
claimed that the conception of the role of experience in ''The Making of the English Working Class'' embodied the idea of a direct link between social being and
social consciousness, ignoring the importance of
discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...
as a means of mediating between the two, enabling people to develop a political understanding of the world and orientating them to political action. Marc Steinberg argued that Stedman Jones' interpretation of Thompson's perspective was "reductionist", with Thompson understanding the relationship between experience and consciousness as a "complex dialectical relationship".
Wade Matthews argued in 2013:
:Numerous books, special collections, and journal articles on E.P. Thompson's scholarly work and legacy appeared soon after his death in 1993. Since then, however, interest in Thompson has waned. The reasons for this are perhaps easily enough summarized. Today, Thompson's histories are viewed as old-fashioned, while his socialist politics are believed extinct. Class is considered neither a fruitful concept of historical analysis nor an appropriate basis for an emancipatory politics. Nuclear weapons proliferate, but no anti-nuclear movement grows up alongside their proliferation. Civil liberties are a minority, and increasingly "radical," interest in the age of the "war on terror." Internationalism, as ideology and practice, is the preserve of capital not labour. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Thompson seems out of place. ...certainly part of his distinctiveness lay in his literary style and tone. But it also lay in the moral quality which undergirded his histories and his political interventions. Part of that quality was the "glimpses of other possibilities of human nature, other ways of behaving" that they gave us. In this way, as Stefan Collini has suggested, Thompson is perhaps more relevant than he ever was.
Personal life
In 1948 Thompson married
Dorothy Towers, whom he met at Cambridge. A fellow left-wing historian, she wrote studies on women in the
Chartist movement, and the biography ''
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in January 1901. Her reign of 63 year ...
: Gender and Power''; she was Professor of History at the
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...
. The Thompsons had three children, the youngest of whom is the award-winning children's writer,
Kate Thompson.
After four years of declining health, Thompson died at his home in
Upper Wick, Worcestershire, on 28 August 1993, aged 69.
Honours
A
blue plaque
A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom, and certain other countries and territories, to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving a ...
to the Thompsons was erected by the
Halifax Civic Trust.
Selected works
* ''William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.'' London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955.
* "Socialist Humanism," ''The New Reasoner,'' vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer 1957), pp. 105–143.
* "The New Left," ''The New Reasoner,'' whole no. 9 (Summer 1959), pp. 1–17.
* ''
The Making of the English Working Class
''The Making of the English Working Class'' is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and republished in revised form in 1968 by Pelican, after ...
'' London: Victor Gollancz (1963); 2nd edition with new postscript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, third edition with new preface 1980.
* "Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism." ''Past & Present,'' vol 38, no. 1 (1967), pp. 56–97.
* "The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century." ''Past & Present,'' vol. 50, no. 1 (1971), pp. 76–136.
* ''Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act'', London: Allen Lane, 1975.
* ''Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England.'' (Editor.) London: Allen Lane, 1975.
* ''The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays'', London: Merlin Press, 1978.
* ''Writing by Candlelight'', London: Merlin Press, 1980.
* ''Zero Option'', London: Merlin Press, 1982.
* ''Double Exposure'', London: Merlin Press, 1985.
* ''The Heavy Dancers'', London: Merlin Press, 1985.
* ''The Sykaos Papers'', London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
*
Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture', London: Merlin Press, 1991.
* ''Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
* ''Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore'', Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.
* ''Making History: Writings on History and Culture'', New York: New Press, 1994.
* ''Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944'', Rendlesham: Merlin, 1997.
* ''The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age'', Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997.
* ''Collected Poems'', Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999.
See also
*
Communist Party Historians Group
The Communist Party Historians' Group (CPHG) was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that formed a highly influential cluster of United Kingdom, British Marxist historiography, Marxist historians. The Historians' Group de ...
* ''
The New Reasoner''
*
Postpositivism
*
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices rel ...
References
Further reading
*
* Berger, Stefan, and Christian Wicke. "‘… two monstrous antagonistic structures’: E. P. Thompson’s Marxist Historical Philosophy and Peace Activism during the Cold War." in ''Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements during the Cold War'' (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019) pp. 163-185.
* Bess, M. D., "E. P. Thompson: the historian as activist", ''American Historical Review'', vol. 98 (1993), pp. 19–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.1.19
* Best, Geoffrey, "''The Making of the English Working Class''
eview, ''The Historical Journal'', vol. 8, no. 2 (1965), pp. 271–81.
*
* Clevenger, Samuel M. "Culturalism, EP Thompson and the polemic in British cultural studies." ''Continuum'' 33.4 (2019): 489-500.
* Davis, Madeleine; Morgan, Kevin, "'Causes that were lost'? Fifty years of E. P. Thompson's ''The Making of the English Working Class'' as contemporary history", ''Contemporary British History'', vol. 28, no. 4 (2014), pp. 374–81.
* Delius, Peter. "E.P. Thompson,‘social history’, and South African historiography, 1970–90." ''Journal of African History'' 58.1 (2017): 3-17.
* Dworkin, Dennis, ''Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies'' (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
* Eastwood, D., "History, politics and reputation: E. P. Thompson reconsidered", ''History'', vol. 85, no. 280 (2000), pp. 634–54.
* Efstathiou, Christos. "E.P. Thompson's concept of class formation and its political implications: Echoes of popular front radicalism in The making of the English working class." ''Contemporary British History'' 28.4 (2014): 404-421.
* Efstathiou, Christos. "E.P. Thompson, the Early New Left and the Fife Socialist League." ''Labour History Review'' 81.1 (2016): 25-48
online* Efstathiou, Christos. ''E.P. Thompson: A Twentieth Century Romantic'', (London: Merlin Press, 2015).
* Epstein, James. "Among the Romantics: EP Thompson and the Poetics of Disenchantment." ''Journal of British Studies'' 56.2 (2017): 322-350.
* Fieldhouse, Roger and Taylor, Richard (Eds.) (2014) ''E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism'', Manchester: Manchester University Press.
* Flewers, Paul. "E.P. Thompson’s Investigation of Stalinism: An Unrealised Project." ''Critique'' 45.4 (2017): 549-582.
* Fuchs, Christian. "Revisiting the Althusser/EP Thompson-controversy: towards a Marxist theory of communication." ''Communication and the Public'' 4.1 (2019): 3-2
online
* Hall, Stuart, "Life and times of the first New Left", ''New Left Review'', 2nd series, vol. 59 (2010), 177–96.
* Hempton, D., and Walsh, J., "E. P. Thompson and Methodism", in Mark A. Noll (ed.), ''God and Mammon: Protestants, Money and The Market, 1790–1860'' (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 99–120.
*
* Hobsbawm, Eric, "Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993)", ''Proceedings of the British Academy'', vol. 90 (1996), pp. 521–39.
* Hyslop, Jonathan. "The Experience of War and the Making of a Historian: E.P. Thompson on Military Power, the Colonial Revolution and Nuclear Weapons." ''South African Historical Journal'' 68.3 (2016): 267-28
online
*
*
*
* Kenny, Michael. "E.P. Thompson: last of the English radicals?." ''Political Quarterly'' 88.4 (2017): 579-588.
* Kenny, Michael, ''The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin'' (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995)
online*
*
*
* McCann, Gerard. ''Theory and History: The Political Thought of E. P. Thompson'' (Routledge, 2019).
* McIlroy, John. "Another look at E. P. Thompson and British Communism, 1937–1955." ''Labor History'' 58.4 (2017): 506-539
online* McWilliam, Rohan, "Back to the future: E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and the remaking of nineteenth-century British history", ''Social History'', vol. 39, no. 2 (2014), pp. 149–59.
* Matthews, Wade. "Remaking EP Thompson." ''Labour/Le Travail'' 72#1 (2013): 253–278
online*
*
* Millar, Kathleen M. "Introduction: Reading twenty-first-century capitalism through the lens of EP Thompson." ''Focaal'' 2015.73 (2015): 3-1
online
* Palmer, Bryan D. "Paradox and polemic; argument and awkwardness: Reflections on E.P. Thompson." ''Contemporary British History'' 28.4 (2014): 382-403.
*
*
*
* Sandoica, Elena Hernández. "Still Reading Edward P. Thompson." ''Culture & History Digital Journal'' 6.1 (2017): e009-e009
online* Scott, Joan Wallach, "Women in ''The Making of the English Working Class''", in Scott, Joan Wallach, ''Gender and the Politics of History'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 68–92.
* Shenk, Timothy. "" I Am No Longer Answerable for Its Actions": EP Thompson After Moral Economy." ''Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development'' 11.2 (2020): 241-24
excerpt
* Steinberg, Marc W., "'A way of struggle': Reformations and affirmations of E. P. Thompson's class analysis in the light of postmodern theories of language", ''British Journal of Sociology'', vol. 48, no. 3 (1997), pp. 471–492.
* Taylor, Jonathan R. P. "There is A Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson 80 Years on". Imprint Lulu. Brittunculi Records & Books. His first book and as first published by E. P. Thompson at Victor Gollancz: 1947 — the Fanfare Press London. This was a memoir to his older poet sibling 'Frank Thompson SOE' executed by fascists in Bulgaria: 1944. ISBN 9781304479525.
* Todd, Selina, "Class, experience and Britain's twentieth century", ''Social History'', vol. 49, no. 4 (2014), pp. 489–508.
* del Valle Alcalá, Roberto. "A multitude of hopes: Humanism and subjectivity in E.P. Thompson and Antonio Negri" ''Culture, Theory and Critique'' 54.1 (2013): 74-8
online
*
*
* Winant, Gabriel, et al. "Introduction: The Global E.P. Thompson." ''International Review of Social History'' 61.1 (2016): 1-
online
External links
* .
* .
and Dorothy Thompson, Family Website. Now hosted on the Verso Books website*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson, Edward Palmer
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